Marks of His Wounds: Gender Politics and Bodily Resurrection

Marks of His Wounds

This page intentionally left blank

Marks of His Wounds Gender Politics and Bodily Resurrection

beth felker jones

1

2007

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright # 2007 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jones, Beth Felker, 1976– Marks of his wounds : gender politics and bodily resurrection / Beth Felker Jones. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-530981-2 1. Body, human—religious aspects—Christianity—History of doctrines. 2. Resurrection—History of doctrines. 3. Feminist theology. I. Title. BT741.3.J66 2007 233'.5—dc22 2006024865

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

For Brian

This page intentionally left blank

Acknowledgments

I owe much to those friends, teachers, and colleagues whose generous ways of being in relationship with me—body, mind, and spirit—have shaped this book. Among these are Jana Bennett, Kate Blanchard, Jason Byassee, J. Kameron Carter, Holly Taylor Coolman, Dana Dillon, Rosalee Ewell, Amy Laura Hall, Stanley Hauerwas, Richard Hays, Willie Jennings, Fred Lamar, Roger Owens, Traci Smith, Warren Smith, David Steinmetz, Edwin Woodruff Tait, Ginger Thomas, and Geoffrey Wainwright. I am indebted to Reinhard Hu¨tter for teaching me much about careful thought and living the life of a theologian. Anna Lee, Joanna Shenk, and Cathy Norman Peterson provided valuable technical and editorial assistance. I am grateful to Cynthia Read and all the editors at Oxford University Press for their help in guiding me through my first book. I am thankful for the congregations at Epworth United Methodist Church in Durham, North Carolina and Christ’s United Methodist Church in Roanoke, Indiana. I hope the argument in this volume has benefited from my dwelling with the body of Christ in those particular places. I am grateful to my parents, Dean and Jo Felker, especially to my mother for the great gift of her time. I could not have written this essay without my children, Gwen and Sam. The birth of my argument was book-ended by the births of my babies, and it is their much-loved bodies that have prompted me to think about God’s intentions for material creatures.

viii

acknowledgments

I am humbled by the ways God has used them to mark my bodily life. The book is dedicated to my husband, Brian. His faithfulness challenges me constantly, maddeningly, blessedly, to turn our whole life together toward the embodied care of God’s loved ones. The book is a revision of my Duke University dissertation, copyright # UMI Company, 2005. Quotations from Augustine’s The City of God against the Pagans are from the translation by R. W. Dyson, copyright # in the translation and editorial matter Cambridge University Press, 1998; reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

Contents

Introduction, 3 1. The Body Broken, 9 2. The Body Ordered, 25 3. The Body Dying, 49 4. The Body Raised, 69 5. The Body Sanctified, 87 Notes, 115 References, 143 Index, 151

This page intentionally left blank

Marks of His Wounds

This page intentionally left blank

Introduction

We are conditioned to think of salvation as being about anything but the body. We think that what God wants for human beings has to do with our thoughts, with our hearts, with a private and interior relationship. In both popular piety and academic theology, there are strong spiritualizing tendencies. Our gnostic culture and churches deny the importance of bodily life.1 When pressed, many members of Christian congregations deny the resurrection of the body in favor of some version of immortality only for the soul. The idea that the Christian faith might change the way we think about, and even what we do with, our bodies meets with steep resistance. But Christians affirm that the one ‘‘who raised Christ from the dead’’ will ‘‘give life to’’ our ‘‘mortal bodies’’ (Romans 8:11).2 The people of God ‘‘groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies’’ (Romans 8:23). Embodiment is for God’s glory. The body has everything to do with our relationship with and life before God. It has everything to do with our hope for holiness. In this book, I articulate a Christian theology of human embodiment in light of both resurrection doctrine and feminist political concerns. I forward a theology of the body through (1) a doctrinal focus on the resurrection instead of on creation and (2) a sensitivity to the gendered body as an illustration of the integrally psychosomatic nature of redemption. Through reading Augustine and Calvin and assessing their theologies of the body, I show how the Christian theological tradition contains the resources we need to think through

4

introduction

the history and future of the theology of the body as it coheres with the doctrine of the resurrection. The resurrection of the flesh can help to make sense of our bodies: of what they are and what they are for. The concept of the resurrection of the body, essential to the earliest Christian confessions of faith, includes the expectation that not only was Jesus of Nazareth raised from the grave, but all of humanity will also someday so arise. This hope is determinative of any Christian theology of the body. Resurrection doctrine is indicative not only of final hopes, but also of present attitudes toward the bodies of the living. It ought, for Christians, to discipline our embodied lives. The doctrine is central to our working out, as the body of Christ, how our own bodies must be at the heart of the very possibility that God might make us into a holy people. In exploring the theological meaning of the human body, I do not, as is frequently done, begin with creation. Instead, I begin with the doctrine of the bodily resurrection in order to understand the body as integral to redemption. If we want to know what God intends for bodily creatures, the resurrected body of the Son, and not our own sinful bodies, is the place we need to start. To insist that God saves us in the body is also to insist that God demands visible holiness. I come from a wavering holiness tradition struggling to make sense of its own particularity. Whatever else God planned for the Methodists, it surely was to give witness to God’s intention to make people holy. But holiness is meaningless outside of the body that would make it accessible to a world in need, and this is perhaps the reason my church is faltering. I hope, in this volume, to make a contribution toward reclaiming the distinctiveness of my own theological tradition by pushing for the practice of embodied holiness. God makes us holy through the concrete body of Christ. God writes on our flesh, and the body of Jesus Christ, risen yet visibly wounded, is the display and model of God’s holiness to which we must turn if we have any hope of speaking of right human relationship with God. The argument is about all human bodies, but the gendered body serves as a primary illustration for my analysis. The significance of this illustration is found, first, in the crucial importance of the body to feminist theory and, second, in my conviction that, when we seek to speak of holiness, the questions at hand have much to do with the political questions raised by feminism.3 It is common to think of our culture as one that worships bodies, and, to some extent, this is probably a right characterization. Yet at a deeper level, we live in a profoundly anti-body culture. The cult around the young body, the veneration of the airbrushed, media-produced body, conceals a thinly veiled hatred of real bodies—bodies that leak and bleed, wrinkle, smell, grow old, and, finally, die. Cultural practice expresses aversion to the body or denies the

introduction

5

body’s mortality. The beauty industry commands billions of dollars meant to keep the body looking young. People submit to the surgeon’s knife, buying liposuction or silicone breasts. Teenagers self-mutilate. Punishing exercise coexists with patterns of eating that poison the body. In using the gendered body as an illustration of resurrection doctrine, I am convinced it is not incidental that most of these practices center on female bodies. Such practices, though they seem obsessed with bodies, conceal a loathing of the flesh, of the physical body that will finally succumb to death. The theologically ordered body, the body that will, at the resurrection, be integral to our final redemption, offers hope to precisely this culture. It also stands as a countercultural marker, a pointer to the risen, embodied Lord who assumed our flesh to save us. The body is not an obstacle to be overcome. Instead, it is intertwined with our telos as creatures, and it must not be discounted if the Church hopes to live as a holy people on this side of the eschaton. Even as media-fed adulation of improbably sanitized human bodies litters our cultural consciousness, academics have complicated the concept of the body. A proliferation of writings seeks either to find meaning in our physicality or to deny that we might find meaning there. In contributing a Christian systematic theological approach to the body, my intent is to move beyond the standard debates about essentialism versus constructivism. By ‘‘Christian,’’ I mean a theology standing within the broad consensus of the ecclesial community across time and space, a theology conceived as faith seeking the right way both of living faithful lives and understanding faithfulness before the concrete Christ. By ‘‘systematic,’’ I mean work that takes seriously the intersection of any doctrine on the body with other key doctrinal loci: among those, incarnation, eschatology, and ecclesiology. Though an important facet of this project involves a certain interpretation of Christian tradition, it is not a strictly historical study. I investigate the tradition on bodily resurrection with a constructive theological goal in mind. I make no pretense that the Christian tradition is one of unmitigated holiness, but I do have a pneumatologically grounded confidence that we may discover holiness amidst the brokenness. For the sake of clarity, I need to distinguish my approach from a quite different one. I diverge from feminist approaches that start with a loose understanding of incarnation but ignore the specificities, not only of the story of Christ as narrated in scripture, but also (and this latter does not exclude the Christ of scripture) of Chalcedon. These projects recognize some of the same questions that concern me, questions concerning the relationship between bodies and power and the particular ways that power shapes female bodies.4 Yet, the sum of my difference with such projects is in the supposition that ‘‘Christianity and patriarchy are highly compatible bed-fellows.’’5 My premise

6

introduction

is, rather, that they are the least compatible bedfellows of all, even while the deformation of Christianity by something like ‘‘patriarchy’’ has conjured various monsters, including deeply un-Christian conceptions of bodies and materiality. My conviction is that theology as such is feminist. In other words, there is no right theology that is not feminist just because God intends good for all creation, including male and female. Were theological projects faithful, we would not need the designator ‘‘feminist’’ to remind us of those places where theologians have failed to deal explicitly with God’s care for those made weak in this world. My starting point is not experience (women’s subjectivity) but that tradition which, again through time and space, has sought faithfulness to a specific and concrete risen Lord, the same Lord who is the paradigm of that into which we hope, body and soul, to be transformed. In clearing space for my theology of the body, in chapter 1 I develop the claim that any adequate understanding of human life in the body requires an account of the brokenness of the body, of the ways we human beings torture our own and each other’s bodies and of the pain of death. Contemporary feminists understand bodies as locations for the operation of power. While arguing that these insights are deeply important, I maintain that only a theological conceptualization of the body can make sense of the broken body of death. Chapter 2 begins such a theology of the body through conversation with Augustine of Hippo. In his City of God, Augustine maintains two paradoxical truths about the body: it is both very good and terribly disordered. The right ordering of people toward God will be accomplished in the resurrection body when our bodies will give unmitigated witness to the Creator. With Augustine’s hope for the ordering of the body in place, chapter 3 turns to promises and problems in John Calvin’s treatment of the resurrection body. Reading Calvin helps to clarify why we cannot, as Calvin sometimes does, conceive the body as an obstacle between creature and Creator. Calvin helps us see death as the enemy of our bodies. Read together, the treatments of bodily resurrection in Augustine and Calvin shed light on one another. In counterpoint, they unfold particular strengths and weaknesses for a theology of the body based in the resurrection. These readings of Augustine and Calvin create a narrative about the doctrine of bodily resurrection, and they also serve to provide a flavor of what has been historically affirmed in the creedal confession of the resurrection of the flesh. Drawing from the interpretations of Augustine and Calvin in the preceding chapters, I explicate in chapter 4 a way of understanding human creatures as fundamental psychosomatic unities. Such an understanding

introduction

7

becomes the conceptual basis for talk of sanctification. Finally, chapter 5 highlights the gendered body as illustration of what it might mean to be made holy by being engrafted into the body of a man who was put to death on a cross and rose from the grave with the marks of that death still visible in his body, in his glorified wounds. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body, approached Christologically, gets at those questions of life and death that most discussions of bodies only dance around. The doctrine makes it clear that death is an enemy. It destroys all insidious platitudes that would call death anything else. ‘‘Christianity is not reconciliation with death,’’ says Alexander Schmemann; ‘‘It is the revelation of death, and it reveals death because it is the revelation of Life. Christ is this Life.’’6 The risen body of Christ, alive in the truest sense, mediates life to our own dying bodies. John Donne was gesturing to the heart of the Christian faith when he claimed that death is not ‘‘Mighty and dreadful’’ as it seems. ‘‘Death, be not proud,’’ wrote Donne, ‘‘One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And Death shall be no more; Death thou shalt die.’’7 Death is a conquered enemy. This is the hope to which the holy Christian body is meant to bear witness as, in Paul’s words, Christians carry ‘‘in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies’’ (2 Corinthians 4:10).

This page intentionally left blank

1 The Body Broken

But someone will ask, ‘‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’’ —1 Corinthians 15:35 Broken bodies litter the streets of our collective history. Those broken bodies pile up in our most recent history, haunting and accusing all of humanity with their stories of violence. Stretched across time, we embodied creatures grieve and mourn our dead. Weeping at the graves of our loved ones, we turn in revulsion from the body of death. We futilely try to escape it, to flee the unavoidable stink of decay. All the while, the cancer-racked body, the war-torn body, the body racialized and then enslaved or incinerated, the body raped or beaten, the body twisted out of recognition by inner or outer torture—all cry out in chorus for theological conceptualization.1 ‘‘What is the use,’’ asks Alexander Schmemann, ‘‘of freedom, prosperity, and food to one who is condemned to death? Why should one build vacation homes in a cemetery?’’2 The dying body cannot be escaped. Current understandings of bodies tend to dissolve into hopeless confusion even as concrete harm to the bodies of specific human beings multiplies, even while the bodies of God’s people are broken and forsaken. As is discussed in chapter 2, through conversation with Augustine, our bodies are perniciously disordered. Because of this reality, only an explicitly theological exposition of the body will enable a right

10

marks of his wounds

understanding of how the broken and disordered body may, finally and graciously, be ordered anew and healed, made both holy and whole. This chapter clears the ground for such a claim by situating the body in theological perspective, especially in regard to the Christian doctrine of bodily resurrection. My theological examination of human embodiment is also located in the context of contemporary feminist theory regarding the brokenness of our ways of conceiving the body, especially the bodies of women. Placing the body in relation to both resurrection doctrine and feminist politics serves as preparation for a careful reading of two historical Christian theologies of the body. It is necessary to understand existing attempts to give meaning to the body before we can understand the theological resources Augustine and Calvin may offer us, across the years, for a contemporary theology of the body. It is also critical to understand the ways that current conceptual options are themselves broken options, which fail to account for the broken, dying, and dead bodies of our past and our present. Only when the body is conceptualized firmly in reference to the body for which Christians hope, the body redeemed in Jesus Christ, can we account for the broken bodies of humanity. Problematized in contemporary scholarship, the word ‘‘body’’ has lost any sure referent. The social body, the body politic, the body of Christ in Christian sacramentology and ecclesiology, and even the individual organic body—that entity at first blush most obviously accessible to sight, to touch, to reason—all come into question. Are these bodies tangible? Are they real? Are the bodies we think we know natural, as we believe? Are there, in fact, male or female bodies? black, white, or brown bodies? healthy or diseased bodies? whole or broken bodies? Are individual bodies bounded and singular, or do they bleed into one another, shape one another, and even construct one another? Can they, meaningfully and materially, be part of a body politic, of a body ecclesial? Two strands of interpretation stand in uneasy tension in recent literature on the body. On the one hand, some want to celebrate the very tangibility of the body as a fundamental aspect of reclaiming the body from its sad fate in the West,3 from renunciation and revilement. Among these stand both feminist and Christian thinkers. The body is solid, feminists might say, exactly because women’s bodies matter. The body, in all its physicality and material difference, is concrete because it is integral to feminist ethics and politics, to the flourishing of those very real embodied women who are at the center of that politics. The body is solid, theologians might say, because it is integral to God’s good work as Creator. The body, in all its physicality and material difference, must be within our grasp because God saves us in the body and thus it is central to Christian ethics and politics, to God’s intentions for

the body broken

11

material embodied people. We need concrete bodies if we are to have concrete political visions, if we are to embody our ethical hopes.4 This claim stands in sharp conflict with those contemporary thinkers, also represented among both feminists and theologians, who question the very givenness of the body. This body ‘‘can be understood only in the context of the social construction of reality; indeed, the body itself is seen as a social construct, a means of social expression or performance by which our identity and value— for ourselves and for others—are created, tested, and validated.’’5 Bodies are artifacts of culture, constructed through relations of power. In this line of thought, male and female bodies, for example, cannot be tangible givens. If they were such givens, they might either sanction oppressive models of gendered life or become idols in themselves, pointing to gods very other than the holy one of Israel. Contained in the rejection of the body as given is the rejection of human ability to read norms from nature. This is rejected because such readings have so often led to violence and abuse. Here, too, ethics has a crucial role. If the bodies we take to be natural are brought into question, so are those ethics that assume certain things of, again for example, male and female bodies. A concern for Christian ethics can never be far from attempts to conceptualize the body theologically. The theology of the body is important because real bodies are broken, beaten, raped, tortured, and killed. This is the imperative of feminist ethics for any theology of the body. While the body may once have been conceivable as the stuff of nature itself, a given which we might access in some unproblematic fashion, the postmodern body slips away from conceptual grasp. No longer available as a unifying image for social cohesion, the contemporary body melts into individualism. We are left with nothing to hold. Yet the body preoccupies our thought. At our moment in history, problems about the body proliferate across the academic disciplines.6 There is something about bodies that inspires anxiety and hope; there is something about the body that we simply cannot leave alone.

Christian Bodies Various generalizations, still regnant despite repeated apology,7 accuse ‘‘religion’’ in general and Christian theology in particular of denigrating and doing violence to the body. Simone de Beauvoir made the following assessment of the Christian tradition on the body: It is Christianity which invests woman anew with frightening prestige: fear of the other sex is one of the forms assumed by the an-

12

marks of his wounds guish of man’s uneasy conscience. The Christian is divided within himself; the separation of body and soul, of life and spirit, is complete; original sin makes of the body the enemy of the soul; all ties of the flesh seem evil. . . . And of course, since woman remains always the Other, it is not held that reciprocally male and female are both flesh: the flesh that is for the Christian the hostile Other is precisely woman . . . the fact of having a body has been considered, in woman, an ignominy.8

Certainly the body has occupied a persistently ambiguous place in the history of Christian thought,9 and, to many, Beauvoir’s statement seems intuitively correct. Christian faith is supposed to demand a schism between soul and body, a fundamental dualism that imprints itself on every aspect of human life. The implication immediately drawn is one of misogyny. Yet the body is central to Christian thought and practice. It is impossible to understand key Christian doctrines rightly—Christology, ecclesiology, creation, and eschatology among them—while accepting Beauvoir’s judgment of Christianity. Christian theology actually entails a systematic antidualism, which has deep implications for our understanding not only of the customary systematic loci, but also for ethics, for the living of the Christian life. I am not simply using Beauvoir as a foil here. At times, her charges have been proven correct. If she is fundamentally right, though, then we lose not only the possibility that Christian theology might, at its heart, be a feminist enterprise but also the hope that our bodies might be integral to our holiness. Is the Christian body good without remainder, as is suggested by many contemporary theologians, especially those concerned with the bodies of women? Or is the body evil, a weight that drags the Christian away from God but will be discarded as we are redeemed? Is the body to be embraced or punished? Is the body a gift, or is it an encumbrance leading to sin? Detractors can be excused for supposing that it has not been entirely clear, in Christian theology and practice, whether the body is a positive or a negative. A bit of historical and theological perspective will help make sense of these ambiguities. In the Christian tradition, the temptation to denigrate the body has been continually reasserted and consistently rejected. Orthodox understandings of the body were formulated in careful response to gnostic alternatives.10 Hopes for the soul have always been intertwined with training of the body. For example, in the ancient Christian East, Teresa Shaw writes, ‘‘steady, intent focus on the appearance of the body as a sign of holiness and sanctification refutes any easy dismissal of asceticism as bizarre or dualistic.’’11 Whatever problem late ancient Christians had with life in the flesh, it was not a problem

the body broken

13

to be solved by dismissing the body. Peter Brown, like Shaw, questions labeling acetic practice as ‘‘dualist.’’ Ascetic transformation was viewed as a foretaste of the bodily resurrection, of redemption in the body. The ascetic body was expected to transform the soul.12 The Church has also been understood as holy body. Holy virgins and holy martyrs, both conceived as examples of Christian piety, were holy precisely in, through, and because of their chaste and faithful bodies. In historical images of Christ’s body, we see that the Christian body may challenge societal constructs of power.13 Sarah Beckwith shows how Christ’s body functioned, in the later Middle Ages, as locus of identity: ‘‘It is perhaps a commonplace of medieval political and social theory that the body is the image par excellence of human society.’’14 Beckwith locates Christ’s body in religious and social context as ‘‘the arena where social identity was negotiated, where the relationship of self and society, subjectivity and social process found a point of contact and conflict.’’15 Here, the Christian body is simultaneously an image of social hierarchy and the site of resistance to that hierarchy. It served both what society had ratified as ‘‘natural’’ and a breakdown of those supposedly natural hierarchies. Brown reminds us that, for early Christians, the body was understood in the context of the threat of death that we so desperately deny in our culture. The prominent shadow of death meant that society took the reproduction of children quite seriously. Babies had to be born if the people were to stay ahead of the power of death, and the city ‘‘mobilized [women] to use their bodies for reproduction.’’16 Here we are reminded that gender, at least in part, was and is constructed in response to the horrors of death. The celibate Christian woman’s body was thus servant to a very different politics than that of the state. As Church history demonstrates, Christians have always affirmed doctrinal positions that point us away from the pernicious implications of dualism, implications that I consider more fully later in this chapter. But there have always also been cultural and philosophical factors that have pressed us in another, antisomatic, direction. Christian doctrine has many implications for a theology of the body. The most usual entry point into conceptualizing the theological body is through the doctrine of creation. In affirming a Christian understanding of creation, it is also acknowledged that the created world is ‘‘very good’’ (Genesis 1:31). The doctrine of creation immediately contraindicates denigration of physicality; this material world (not only the spiritual world) is good, and it is a gift from God. So bodies, also, are good gifts of God. At the same time, the physical world is not God; there is an unbreachable divide between creature and Creator at the heart of authentic Christian theology. So, too, bodies are not divine; they bear all the limits of the creaturely

14

marks of his wounds

nature. Errors in thinking about the body result from forgetting either of these truths inherent in the doctrine of creation. Extremes of severity against the body result from denying the body as good gift; extremes of self-indulgence and decadence result from denying the body as creature. And yet, the doctrine of creation, as it is usually approached as granting us access to God’s intentions for nature, can only take us so far in understanding the body. The problem here is not approaching the body through creation as such—nature as created is always already ordered to God and surely contains access to God’s intentions for the created body. The problem lies in that prevailing modern construal of creation, in which it is assumed that we can access all the knowledge of bodies we need through unmediated nature. The trouble with such a position is that this unmediated nature, like our own epistemological possibilities, is fallen. By approaching the theology of the body through redemption, and not through creation, it finally will be clear that an opposition between creation and redemption can only be a false one.17 But, in a context in which the body’s very status as natural has come under fire, in a context where creation theology has been used to underwrite violence against the body, creation can no longer grant us access to the theology of the body. In a context where we can no longer assume that what is apparent to us about my body, about your body, is a normative sign of God’s creative intention, creation has to be approached and interpreted through redemption. Not only has our access to nature been questioned, but we have also come to realize that those things we have called natural have been marshaled to sanction our own sinful desires. Again, gender serves as a helpful illustration. Assuming that social roles and norms are natural expressions of what it is to be male and female, society, and sometimes theology, reifies those norms, often to the detriment of particular men and women. But our sinful desires themselves are proper only to fallen and not to created nature. So, Christology must inform our theologies of the body. Because the Word was made flesh, our thinking about our own flesh must be irrevocably altered. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the body change the way we think about our own life, death, and resurrection in the body: ‘‘For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin’’ (Romans 6:5–6). Regeneration and sanctification involve not only our spiritual but also our physical lives. God’s election of Israel is an affront to our tendency to subsume the physical to the spiritual; God chose a very particular people, a people in the flesh, to call God’s own. The effects of

the body broken

15

sin are felt in our bodies (which perhaps leads to many of the objections to the idea of a bodily resurrection: we assume that having bodies must inevitably include the fruits of sin, the pain and disease that might be named as those fruits). We cannot be saved in soul alone. We must be renewed in the body. And we affirm that all of creation will in fact be so renewed: ‘‘The creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies’’ (Romans 8:21–23). God will not abandon the body. Eschatology thus sheds light on the theology of the body. The resurrection of the body and the renewal of physical creation are among the most distinctive things for which Christians hope when God’s reign is revealed in its fullness. Together, the doctrines of Christology and eschatology meet in Christ’s resurrected body, the enfleshed eschaton, to help us understand bodies, first, through redemption. Only after we have considered the body in that light will we be able to understand it through the lens of creation. Only then will we be able to read the created body as it truly is. Historical accounts and doctrinal considerations together mitigate the charge that the logic of Christian theology and practice are inescapably dualist. Nowhere is this more clear than in the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh. We must reclaim that doctrine to make adequate sense of the body redeemed.

Bodily Resurrection The epigraphs for each of the chapters in this volume come from the biblical locus classicus for understanding the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, 1 Corinthians 15. The passage has been open to various interpretations. Caroline Walker Bynum provides a fascinating intellectual history of the conceptualization of resurrection bodies.18 Bynum contends that the paradigmatic theological image for the resurrection body is the seed, a metaphor drawn from Paul’s treatment of the topic. Because the passage is so central to a theological understanding of the doctrine of bodily resurrection, it is worthwhile to quote it at length: But someone will ask, ‘‘How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?’’ Fool! What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And as for what you sow, you do not sow the body that is to be,

16

marks of his wounds but a bare seed, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body. . . . What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. . . . Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. What I am saying, brothers and sisters, is this: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Listen, I will tell you a mystery! We will not all die, but we will all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we will be changed. For this perishable body must put on imperishability, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: ‘‘Death has been swallowed up in victory. Where, o Death, is thy victory? Where, o Death, is thy sting?’’ (1 Corinthians 15:35–38, 42–44, 49–55)

Bynum takes the passage as one that emphasizes discontinuity between bodies now, the seed, and bodies as they will be at the resurrection, sprouted.19 But the text certainly has been and can be read as calling attention to identity between the two. One puzzle over the resurrection body, found throughout the tradition, is here in Paul’s text. Namely, how are those bodies both the same as bodies now and also different from them? Tradition has stressed the sameness, the identity of bodies between-the-times and bodies at the end. A firmly materialist emphasis on corporeal continuity has always been maintained in opposition to other concepts of resurrection. Bynum’s historical account forwards the crucial pronouncement that ‘‘Western Christianity did not hate or discount the body. Indeed, person was not person without body.’’20 Patristic thought on bodily resurrection developed in the context of the then-pressing threats of Gnosticism, Docetism, and the possibility of martyrdom. Church fathers (especially the deeply materialist Tertullian and Irenaeus) came to describe resurrection as ‘‘reassemblage’’—accounts in which all the actual material ‘‘bits’’ of a body are conceived as awaiting reunion by divine fiat.21 So, in part, the doctrine came to be about the absolute omnipotence of God in the face of crumbling bodies. Here, the resurrection of the dead was referred to the bodies of the martyrs. Bynum characterizes the ‘‘paradigmatic body’’ of these fathers: it ‘‘is the cadaver; flesh is that which

the body broken

17

undergoes fundamental organic change . . . [resurrection] is a victory not so much over sin, or even over death, as over putrefaction.’’22 This theme, of rot itself as that which is defeated by the bodily resurrection, is reechoed through the tradition. Early scholasticism conceptualizes bodies in a manner that coheres with such resurrection doctrine: the body is necessary for personhood, the body is ‘‘flesh,’’ identity between earthly bodies and resurrection bodies must be assured, resurrection is return of the physical particles dissolved at death, and the ‘‘resurrected body was structurally as well as materially identical with the body of earth,’’ so embodied difference—for example, gender and class—would be preserved at the resurrection.23 Strong physicalism is the hallmark of the tradition on bodily resurrection that would exercise normative influence on the Christian Church for centuries. As theologians sought to understand the doctrine, they came to stress the importance of the body’s materiality and the importance of the body to personal identity.24 The rediscovery of Aristotle in the West led to a rethinking of human nature, and, then as now, there was fear that new knowledge would make it impossible to conceptualize bodily resurrection. But Aquinas turned from concepts of the reassemblage of material bits of flesh to new metaphors: a city is the same city when the entirety of its people are dead and replaced; a fire is the same fire when all the logs are burnt and replaced. These new images are connected with Aquinas’s understanding of formal identity: the soul is the form of the body, and ‘‘death became the severing of the metaphysical components of the subsisting individual homo; resurrection was guaranteed not by the desire of soul for its partner but by the necessity for ontological completeness.’’25 In chapter 4, I discuss Aquinas’s reinterpretation of resurrection as an aid for expositing human psychosomatic unity as the conceptual basis for sanctification. Interpretation of resurrection doctrine has always been associated with attendant concepts of paradigmatic bodies. What is the paradigmatic body in our culture and in our theology? What is the most fitting Christian paradigmatic body? How will that paradigm be informed by the historical figures of the martyr, the ascetic, and, most important, the redemptive body of Christ? In approaching a Christian theology of the body through the doctrine of the resurrection, the logic of the Christian body is pushed to its fullest. And, as we see in Bynum’s careful history, the body is central to resurrection doctrine; it is what makes it resurrection doctrine and not something else altogether.26 It is in the doctrine of the resurrection that we find our bodies most clearly related to the body of Jesus of Nazareth, the one who is the first fruits of the dead. Understanding the centrality of the body of Christ to the doctrine of the general resurrection allows us to approach our own bodies in a new way. In

18

marks of his wounds

outlining the body in Christian theology and the historical doctrine of the bodily resurrection, we complicate the prevalent notion that any Christian position on the body is inescapably dualist. We now conceptualize the dangers of such dualism.

Feminist Bodies Contemporary strands of feminist theory highlight the importance of the gendered body as illustrative of a theology of the body that grows out of the doctrine of the resurrection. ‘‘Dualist’’ accounts of bodies are rightly implicated in violence against those bodies. Assessments like Beauvoir’s tie Christianity to this brokenness, and, while we have begun to see alternatives, the task of articulating a theology of the body through the resurrection remains. We need to pause to consider serious claims in feminist thought about the ways particular bodies are systematically subject to violence and brokenness. Here, questions about the body intersect with questions about gender, race, and power. Those questions make clear why the body ‘‘matters’’ to those concerned with the politics of both feminism and theology. Both feminism and theology ought to point us to the politics of God’s kingdom—to that life of perfect peace where the bodies of some are no longer targeted for abuse. Feminist work and theological work are always already explicitly political in this way. This is clearly seen in feminist arguments about the problems of dualism and difference, problems that bring embodiment to the forefront of feminist politics.27 The relationship between power and difference is central to feminist analysis of the problem of dualism. Carolyn Allen and Judith Howard typify a current argument when they describe difference as inescapably related to power. Difference, they write, ‘‘also stresses crucial considerations of dominance, social hierarchies and their privileges, centers and margins, systematic structural inequalities, and their relation to each other and their effects on individual subjects.’’28 For Allen and Howard, difference is never about simple benign diversity. Instead, difference always implies power relations. A key ‘‘difference’’ these thinkers have in mind is the sharp one, in Western thought, between the body and soul. It is not the case that body and soul are simply two different things, separate but equal. Instead, body is constructed as subordinate to soul. Here, the theoretical reveals its fiercely political heart. For Allen and Howard, there can be no difference without violence.29 Related to this argument is the contention that the problem of dualism is central to the work of feminist theory and politics. The argument proceeds as

the body broken

19

follows: there is, in Western thought, a range of related dualisms. Here, the female/male dualism is constitutive or primary in such a way that it structures the other binary pairs: Male Soul Mind Culture Public Reason

Female Body Body Nature Private Intuition

One pole of each binary is associated with women, given negative valence, and ‘‘gendered’’ as female. All the ‘‘female’’ poles are then subject to dismissal, scorn, or violence. When I refer to ‘‘dualism,’’ as it is implicated in the brokenness of women’s bodies, I am invoking this normative dualism. When I refer to ‘‘dualism’’ as ethically indefensible, I mean a differential valuation of spiritual and physical that affects other aspects of life. In Western thought, women are constructed as some of the ‘‘others,’’ who function to clarify the existence of dominant groups, and they are especially associated with bodies and with nature. The body is gendered as feminine. Men, in contrast, are associated with reason, culture, and the natural domination of women and all of the negative, female poles of the binary pairs. These are not neutral pairings that simply reflect difference as it is found in reality. Rather, the pairs are constructed as hierarchies. Therefore, attitudes and actions toward all that is bodily are closely coordinated with attitudes and actions toward women. Questions about the body come to light as being always already feminist questions and always already of concern for any theology that hopes to account for the broken body. Feminism has always been concerned with human nature, with anthropology, but contemporary feminism is torn over a fundamental disagreement about the body. Is feminism about reclaiming and valuing the bodies of women, or is it about deconstructing those bodies? To understand the broken and dying body rightly, we must conceptualize anthropology in an explicitly theological manner. In seeking to do this, however, it is helpful to assess the ways in which various feminist possibilities conceptualize human nature and embodiment.30 As liberalism emerged with the growth of capitalism, women attempted to apply the principles of liberal theory to their situation. Liberal feminism thus assumes an undifferentiated account of human nature in which all people are constituted by and in possession of universal liberal rationality.

20

marks of his wounds

Inasmuch as rationality makes the liberal person human, physical characteristics and sexual difference are not important to liberal anthropology. That is, the body itself is outside of liberal anthropology. A key claim of liberal feminism was that women, too, despite their female bodies, are rational.31 Yet, as Alison Jaggar shows, liberal feminism must be critiqued on several feminist grounds. First, the liberal concept of rationality assumes a normative dualism, which makes it impossible to provide the conceptual account of sexual difference, of embodiedness, that is necessary to the work of feminism. What is more, the liberal account of universal rationality is influenced by a male bias: what counts as rational is what ‘‘every thinking man’’ might suppose. Liberal normative dualism fails to account for reproductive biology. Liberal theory forbids giving attention to particular bodies as we attempt to meet human needs. The classic example is found in the organization so deeply committed to liberal principles it cannot offer maternity leave because it would deny the equality, the universality, of the employees. Increasingly, however, theorists believe that there are certain material preconditions necessary for the pursuit of feminism’s political goals. Liberal feminism cannot account for embodied difference and the differential ways—based on gender, class, and race—that bodies have been broken in our society. Postliberal versions of feminism raise important questions, which press on liberal anthropology.32 One of the most severe ways alternative feminist anthropologies destabilize liberal feminist anthropology is in exposing the liberal human being as, among other things, white and male. The liberal human being has always had a particular body; postliberal feminisms have simply directed our attention to it. Gender has become a key analytic tool in postliberal feminisms. Gender is understood not only as a system of social differences between women and men but also as the means of women’s oppression. Gender organizes other aspects of social life (for instance, jobs like nurse and construction worker are gendered, and this has social consequences for those who work in them). Various postliberal feminisms highlight the importance of bodily life to feminist politics. ‘‘Radical’’ feminism insists that reproductive biology—that is, issues surrounding the concreteness of bodily life—must be accounted for in feminist theory. Childbearing and childraising are themselves cultural activities affected by power relations. Feminist politics that fail to deal with the ways society organizes these activities cannot offer concrete hope to embodied women. ‘‘Socialist’’ feminisms33 draw on Marxist political theory to claim women as a class and insist on the historical specificity of women’s oppression. This complicates the work of feminist theory by noting the co-implication of gender with class, race, and sexuality. In order to understand women’s

the body broken

21

oppression, we must account for the gender-specific ways that women perform alienated labor in society.34 The place of the female body is at the heart of what is at stake in various feminist anthropologies. The problematic of normative dualism is also of paramount concern for feminist anthropologies. The body’s association with women is central to feminist understandings of what people are and what politics should be. This has become entangled with the problem of essentialism. Is woman something biological, a given of nature? Is she simply a construct of culture? Is the body central to the work of feminist theory and politics, or has it lost the very meaningfulness necessary to political significance?35 Here, we find explicit disagreement in feminist theory between those who want to find, in ‘‘woman,’’ some universal essence, which makes her what she is, and those who want to deny the existence of any universal womanhood as a creation of oppressive forces. As we work to understand the place of the body in feminist thought, we should note that ‘‘essentialism’’ is linked with a biological understanding of the essence of woman, with the idea that what makes woman woman is to be located in her female body. Strong constructivist theorists deny any essential status to women and men.36 Recognizing the power of normative concepts of gender to control and to do harm, Judith Butler seeks to ‘‘undo restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life.’’37 For Butler, there is no ‘‘woman.’’ Her thesis is that gender is performative, a kind of show we put on rather than essential to who we are. This gender show is performed in interaction with culture, the almost inevitable result of power. For Butler, the practice of drag is really indicative of the status of all gender. While dressing in drag is a subversive display of gender, which calls the natural status of gender into question, all gender involves costume and character. Butler questions the connections between bodies, gender, and desire, connections that are usually assumed to be natural. She deconstructs the sexed body itself. This body is malleable. Binary sexuality becomes a cultural imposition, and the distinction between sex and gender, between nature and culture, is erased. A key problem with such an unswerving constructivist position is the possibility that it may divorce theory from politics, that it offers feminism without ethics.38 Some want to modify the strongest constructivist position, maintaining the importance of the body’s material specificity while drawing on insights about the influence of power on the body itself. Elizabeth Grosz is influenced by Butler’s work39 but claims material bodies as vital to the constructive work of feminist anthropology. ‘‘Bodies,’’ Grosz maintains, ‘‘have all the explanatory power of minds.’’40 Criticizing feminist theory for its implicit participation in the dualism of Western philosophy, she proposes a paradigm for a

22

marks of his wounds

nondualist feminist conceptualization of the body. Bodies are a powerful analytic tool for feminism precisely because thinking about anthropology through the body forces us to contend with sexual difference. Gender cannot be secondary to any theory of human nature that begins with embodiment, and this has important political import. What is this vision for an antidualist, bodily feminist subject? Grosz offers a series of suggestions as central to feminist anthropology. First, feminists must think about persons in ways that specifically exclude those dichotomous accounts of personhood that divide body from mind and construct them in opposition to one another. Mind cannot exclude body, nor can the reverse be true. Second, Grosz rejects essentialist accounts of woman; she recognizes that power, at least in many ways, constitutes corporeality. Third, she wants to free the body from its special association with women and racialized groups. Fourth and finally, Grosz insists that we must refuse singular models of the ideal body. She calls for the rejection of any model in which one body (for example, a thin, white, airbrushed, female body) becomes normative for other bodies and serves as the ideal after which all bodies are to seek. One body ‘‘cannot take on the coercive role of singular norm or ideal for all the others.’’41 In chapter 5, I venture a proposal for a theological anthropology that begins with the doctrine of the resurrection. There, I return to Grosz’s suggestions for conceptualizing the feminist subject and to consideration of the manner in which we may hope to conceive the feminist body theologically. So, there are two apparent alternatives for feminist conceptualization of the body. Feminists have understood the body ‘‘either as something to be rejected in the pursuit of intellectual equality according to a masculinist standard, or as something to be reclaimed as the very essence of the female.’’42 Are we locked into these two options? Must the body be pure construct or pure nature? Serene Jones advances the possibility of using both essentialism and constructivism, of dealing with the need to ‘‘have’’ a subject of feminism while recognizing that culture and power shape people, that our understanding of our subject must always be open to question insofar as that understanding may have been constructed in concert with sinful powers. Jones is committed to Christian theology as a normative discipline, but she still recognizes the indispensable ethical insights of constructivist positions, particularly those concerned with the maneuverings of power.43 Jones suggests that feminist theology is an eschatological essentialism. We must, for the sake of feminist and theological politics, make normative judgments. We must also recognize, under sin, that those judgments may be wrong. It is incredibly problematic to feminist and theological politics to hold to a normative conceptual dualism. It is freeing for women to proclaim ‘‘the body is

the body broken

23

good.’’ It is also freeing for women to be able to say, ‘‘I am not only my body.’’ Women are not bodies while men are minds or souls. All people are both. While feminist goals surely include the affirmation of the body as such, they also include the avowal that women, too, are constituted by spiritual and intellectual pursuits. Some affirmation of physical and spiritual elements to humanity is necessary to a coherent anthropology. Christian anthropology, at its best, lives in the tension that is inevitably created by calling the human being a unity of body and soul. The ‘‘unity’’ in this formulation, which I explore more fully in chapter 4, is critical, and it is a counter to the pitfalls of dualism.

Redirecting the Problem Just as some assume that Christian theology is antisomatic, it is easy to assume that feminism must be about freeing women from their bodies. Anne Lamott describes struggling as she looks into the mirror: I am trying to accept that I am actually m-m-m-m-m-middle-aged. And even though I am a feminist and even though I am religious, I secretly believe, in some mean little rat part of my brain, that I am my skin, my hair, and worst of all, those triangles of fat that pooch at the top of my thighs. In other words, that I am my packaging. Even though both feminism and Christianity have taught me that I am my spirit, my heart, all that I have survived over the years and all that I have been given, still a funny thing happened after I started liking this guy: I looked in the mirror, and sighed, and thought to myself, I will cut my eyes out.44 In articulating a theology of the body in light of the resurrection, perhaps there will be a way for us to rethink what Lamott says she has been taught by feminism and Christianity. Perhaps the intuition that we are our skin, our hair, our thighs can be reclaimed from the despair of mortality. Perhaps our bodies can be sanctified. Perhaps neither feminist nor Christian commitments must mean that we are disembodied spirits, whatever that might mean. Perhaps all that we ‘‘have survived over the years . . . and been given’’ is written on our bodies and is taken up into our salvation as we work, in grace, for the embodiment of the peaceful politics yearned for by feminist theology. The body is conceived in multiform ways. Dismissed as a burden to escape and as suspect, unruly, unpredictable, and disruptive, it is also integral to self, central to relationship, and constitutive of identity. There is a vital warning in the feminist rejection of a dualism that degrades the body and those, particularly women, who are seen as especially bodily. This warning

24

marks of his wounds

has theoretical and political import, and, potentially, theological import as well. Still, unless we can deal with the body of death, we are left unable to fully explain the body broken. At the end of the day, we are confronted still with the body that dies. Schmemann urges us to stand with Christ at the tomb of Lazarus and to recognize that at that moment the body of death is forever changed. Before Christ stood at that tomb, suggests Schmemann, religion and philosophy ‘‘consisted in enabling man to come to terms with death, and if possible even to make death desirable. . . . But Christ weeps at the grave of his friend. . . . Suddenly, death ceases to be a normal and natural fact, it appears as something foreign, as unnatural, as fearsome and perverted, and it is acknowledged as an enemy.’’45 There are attempts to claim death as a good, a part of what is intended for the body and creation. I focus on Jesus’ resurrection as the overcoming of death, not, as is current in some feminist theology, on accepting death as part of an evolutionary cycle.46 I watch the steady march of funerals parade through our little church. I watch the grief at each death, not only those early deaths that are supposed to be especially horrible, and I am baffled by attempts to claim any death as good. Death is enemy, but because of the victory of the resurrection, Christians are freed from having to suppose that preserving life at all costs is the ultimate good. While Grosz tells us how we must not conceptualize the subject of feminism, she does little to help us to conceive that subject anew as we face the broken bodies of human history. We need a thick anthropology that takes account of feminist political concerns while moving beyond those concerns to acknowledge the body of death. In answer, we are left looking for other resources, which are not apparent in surveying the feminist literature on dualism, essentialism, and constructivism. While theory has offered important caveats, it has not finally provided a vision of the person that escapes the hazards brought to light by that theory. We are left wondering whether we can claim the importance of the body without biological reductionism; whether it is possible to claim the existence of difference, between body and soul or between men and women, without violence; whether we can claim the meaning that ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘men,’’ ‘‘bodies’’ and ‘‘souls,’’ must have if we are to envision a politics of peace. And so, we must turn back to theological resources. In chapters 2 and 3, I unfold the doctrine of bodily resurrection as it functioned in the theologies of Augustine and Calvin. Reading these two theologians side by side allows their doctrinal positions to illuminate one another, and, constructively, it exposes key issues for a theology of the body read through the resurrection. Read together, Augustine and Calvin narrate the resurrection in a way that can shape a careful theological understanding of human embodiment.

2 The Body Ordered

If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. . . . But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. —1 Corinthians 15:16, 20 Augustine offers an informative vision of the theologically ordered body. His doctrine of the resurrection is a resource for constructing a theology of the body that speaks to the feminist concerns outlined in chapter 1. When he imagines redemption, Augustine takes the doctrine of bodily resurrection seriously. In the present age, he gives the body a double status: while the body is good by virtue of being created by God, it is disordered under sin. This double status is resolved at the resurrection when the good of the body is completely revealed in the right ordering of the human being toward God. In many attempts to explicate the meaning of the body theologically, one or the other of these two crucial affirmations is sacrificed. Feminist theologies tend to deny the body as disordered,1 while dualist theologies deny the body as good. But losing either point has disastrous consequences for particular bodies. Feminist scholars recognize the malign results of losing the affirmation of the body as good, but the affirmation of the body’s disorder is forgotten or specifically rejected. The impetus for this repudiation comes from the connections between misogyny and denigration of the body discussed in chapter 1, but it leaves strong

26

marks of his wounds

lingering questions. Feminist commitments will surely include affirming the goodness of the body, but do we really want to insist that women, finally, are only bodies? Augustine’s double emphasis—on bodies as good and disordered— points us to the possibility of conceptualizing both women and men as both body and spirit. It points us to affirm the importance of both mental (or spiritual) activity and bodily activity as integral to the flourishing of all human beings. Augustine’s double affirmation—the body is both good and disordered—offers a way through the feminist problems of dualism and essentialism-constructivism outlined in chapter 1. In closely reading Augustine’s bodily understanding of redemption, an alternative for embodiment emerges—one that offers resistance against the degradation and abuse that produces broken bodies. Through and through, Augustine’s City of God is defined by the doctrine of the bodily resurrection. When he sets out to describe the holy city, Augustine is driven by resurrection doctrine, by our final embodied end as it, in turn, is determined by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Augustine’s mature vision of the embodied blessedness of the saints will, for a time, become my argument. Augustine envisions our hope and happiness in the resurrected flesh of Christ. With this account in place, I conclude the chapter by suggesting a theological anthropology that appropriates the concepts of order and of love that govern Augustine’s discussion of bodies.

Doctrine of the Resurrection as Christological Center Augustine distinguishes his understanding of the resurrection from any version of salvation that depends on escape from the body and from any denigration of corporeality as we know it. Instead, Christ’s bodily resurrection is paradigmatic for the future resurrection of all Christians. Augustine demands that we affirm the goodness of the body that Christ assumed for our salvation. When correcting any possible misinterpretation of this central doctrine, Augustine urges focus on the body of Jesus Christ, a referent that is a body in the very familiar, everyday, sense: it can be touched. I explore this fleshy Christological center as I turn to the details of Augustine’s account of the resurrection of the body in City of God. Augustine describes the resurrection body as the reassembling of the selfsame material body that is disassembled when the body-soul union is sundered in death. He always maintains physical identity between the body in this life and the body that is to be raised. When Augustine’s long struggle with the bodily resurrection culminates in City of God, the doctrine takes a most important place. He insists, in hopeful refrain, that it is not the body as such

the body ordered

27

that is problematic. Our problem is instead one of mutability, a problem that evokes all the horror of death and decay. Augustine would be baffled by attempts to claim death as a natural good. He describes death as the ‘‘violent sundering’’ of the body-soul union. In a twist on his well-known formulation on sin, he longs for the non posse mutari of heaven.2 Augustine devotes the twenty-second book to the eternal blessedness of God’s holy city and of the saints who are, in a sense that carries ontological weight, the body of Christ. This blessedness is centered on life and on peace. Eternal life in peace, as the concrete content of our hoped-for blessedness, solves the inescapable anthropological problem of the first twenty-one books: we die. In the twenty-second book, the reader finds constant assurance that the time is coming when she need fear and suffer death no more.3 Moreover, the saints will dwell with each other in perfect peace as they enjoy God and, in God, one another. One might expect an intellectualist account of this peace in life eternal, an account focused only on contemplation. Certainly this figures in Augustine’s vision but, surprisingly and substantially, the last book is focused throughout on the material bodies of the saints who are to rise. In descriptions replete with physical detail, Augustine describes how bodily healings now refer to the future hope of resurrection doctrine. The bodily relics of the martyrs are able to heal Christians in this life exactly because the general resurrection of the body has already been accomplished in the risen Lord (22.9). Physical healings through the intercession of the martyrs make Christ apparent as ‘‘the foremost truth to which they bear witness is that Christ rose from the dead, and first showed in His own flesh the immortality of the resurrection which He promised should be ours’’ (22.10.1136). Here, Augustine draws together overlapping meanings of ‘‘body’’ as body of the individual saint, body of the unique Lord, and ecclesial body, the true body of that Lord, to make a Christological point about the bodies of the martyrs: their very bodies display Christ’s resurrection, which contains the promised immortality of their own flesh. As Augustine responds to an array of colorful objections to the doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh, all of his answers demonstrate a concern with maintaining the materiality of that body and material identity between bodies now and bodies as they will be raised. What will happen to those eaten by wild beasts or, worse, by cannibals? Augustine refers the resurrection to the omnipotence of God, maintaining that no nook or cranny of creation is so removed from that power that God cannot retrieve any scattered parts of the body that might rest there.4 Will aborted fetuses be raised from the dead? Augustine does not want to offer an answer, but he is quite certain that if these little ones are to be numbered among the dead, they must also be

28

marks of his wounds

counted among those who will be raised.5 Augustine addresses a culturally loaded question: Will there be women at the resurrection? Yes, he replies, because a woman’s sex is not a defect; it is natural. God ‘‘who instituted two sexes will restore them both’’ (22.17.1145). Here Augustine’s understandings of creation and redemption interact to bring him to insist, against many in his context, that sexed bodies persist at the resurrection. I return to Augustine’s explanation of female and male bodies in chapter 5, when I focus on consideration of gender and the resurrection body.

Augustine’s Transformation of Beauty and Deformity When Augustine turns to discussion of beauty and blemish in the resurrected body, we find ourselves close to the heart of his doctrine. It is no surprise to find him maintaining that any blemish that detracts from our beauty will not persist at the resurrection. Augustine is careful to insist that the excision of blemish, though, will not mean that anything ‘‘naturally present’’ in our bodies as we know them now, any material stuff constitutive of our identities, will be destroyed. ‘‘If an artist,’’ he says, ‘‘has for some reason made a flawed statue, he can recast it and make it beautiful, removing the defect without losing any of the substance’’ (22.19.1148). It is of crucial importance to Augustine that the resurrected body both (1) preserve identity in substance with the body now and (2) display a beauty fitting the kingdom of God. Remarkably, he presents these two concerns as being in no way incompatible. He reassures his reader that present disfigurement will not plague the resurrected body. Neither the fat nor the thin need fear, says Augustine, for beauty consists in the suitable arrangement of parts, and we may trust that God will finally arrange us rightly. The risen body will have ‘‘no deformity, no infirmity, no heaviness, no corruption—nothing of any kind unfit for that kingdom’’ (22.20.1152). The discussion soon grows serious. What, then, are we to make of the wounds visible in the body of the risen Christ? Augustine says his detractors use this very point against him, dangling it before the faithful as a sign that God cannot accomplish, in the resurrection, the two theological concerns for corporeal identity and beauty. Augustine certainly does not want to argue that the risen Lord did not bear those wounds. What, then, can be made of these persistent marks? He turns to the saints, the very real body of that wounded Lord, as he considers his response: ‘‘I do not know why this is so, but the love we bear for the blessed martyrs makes us desire to see in the kingdom of heaven the marks of the wounds which they received for Christ’s name; and it

the body ordered

29

and the beauty of their virtue—a beauty which is in the body, but not of the body—will shine forth in it’’ (22.19.1149). Augustine begins with the practice of the faithful whose fervent devotion to the martyrs he knows well. The beauty of the martyrs’ virtue will shine in the wounds they received for Christ, will shine forth in their very bodies. How can such wounds persist in that city where our happiness is to be made perfect? It may be that, in that world to come, it will be fitting for them [the saints] to exhibit some marks of their glorious wounds, still visible in their immortal flesh. . . . While, therefore, no blemishes which the body has sustained will be present in the world to come, we are nonetheless not to deem these marks of virtue blemishes, or call them such. (22.19.1149–1150) Here beauty and blemish are themselves radically redefined by the Body of Christ, in both the senses of Jesus’ body and of the Church that becomes that body. What once meant pain and disfigurement now shines in glory. Augustine allows that beauty itself may be transformed by the work accomplished in the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. I return to this point when I address constructive concerns in chapter 5, but for now I allow these remarkable passages to stand, redolent with both tension and promise for a Christian theology of the human body.

Augustine on the Subjection of Flesh to the Spirit But, one might object, the beauty of the wounds described in the preceding quotations is said to shine ‘‘in’’ the body but not ‘‘of ’’ the body (in corpore, non corporis). Does this not show that Augustine refuses to locate human relationship to God in the body? How does Augustine’s conception of the subjection of the flesh to the spirit function in his thought? What theological work does it accomplish as he seeks to articulate the difference between the two cities and their ends? Turning back to the text: Whatever has perished from the living body, therefore, or from the corpse after death, will be restored. Simultaneously with what has remained in the grave, it will rise again, changed from the oldness of the animal body into the newness of the spiritual body, and clothed in incorruption and immortality. Even if the body has been completely ground to powder in some dreadful accident, or by the ferocity of enemies; even if it has been so entirely scattered to the winds or into

30

marks of his wounds the water that there is nothing whatever left of it: still it cannot be in any way withdrawn from the omnipotence of the Creator; rather, not a hair of its head shall perish. The flesh will then be spiritual, and subject to the spirit; but it will still be flesh and not spirit. (22.21.1152)

In this characteristic passage, Augustine shows his understanding, gleaned from his reading of Corinthians, that, when all is made new and rightly ordered toward God, the flesh will become spiritual. The corpus animale will yield to the corpus spirituale. Absolutely, though, the spiritual body, participating in and resembling the risen body of the Lord, will still be flesh. To understand Augustine at this point, we need to turn back to the earlier books of City of God: to his picture of the two cities, their two loves, their two peaces. We need to turn back also to his vision, integral to this picture, of the need for right order as the holy city approaches its eternal happiness in God. If, Augustine maintains, ‘‘we are to discover the character of any people, we have only to examine what it loves’’ (19.24.960). Augustine’s two cities are distinguished by their loves, and it is our disordered loving that must be turned around as God makes the city holy. So, ‘‘in the one city, love of God has been given pride of place, and, in the other, love of self ’’ (14.13.609). When Augustine defends his church against the charge that Christianity is responsible for the sack of Rome, it is to love that he turns in explanation of the misfortunes suffered. The good and fallen angels, identified as the roots of the two cities, are differentiated by ‘‘their wills and desires. For some remained constant in cleaving to that which was the common good of them all: that is, to God Himself, and His eternity, truth, and love. Others, however, delighting in their own power, and supposing that they could be their own good, fell from that higher and blessed good which was common to them all and embraced a private good of their own’’ (12.1.498). What he here ascribes to angels, Augustine does not hesitate to attribute to human beings as well.6 The proper ends of the two cities order every other aspect of their lives together, of their politics: ‘‘For our Final Good is that for the sake of which other things are to be desired, while it is itself to be desired for its own sake’’ (19.1.909). It is right love, love of that good that is precisely not private or individual that defines the holy city. To quote a well-known passage: Two cities, then, have been created by two loves: that is, the earthly by love of self extending even to contempt of God, and the heavenly by love of God extending to contempt of self. The one, therefore, glories in itself, the other in the Lord; the one seeks glory from men, the other finds its highest glory in God. (14.28.632)

the body ordered

31

The overarching argument of the work Augustine composed over so many years involves the ordering of that loving that will finally make holy both individuals and the city that is the very Body of Christ. When Augustine culminates his work with the discussion of bodily resurrection, he is working out an embodied portrait of love that is finally ordered anew. We have to understand Augustine’s picture of ordered and disordered loving if we are to grasp what he is doing when he finally affirms redemption as embodied. Nothing, for Augustine, is exempt from the need for right order, for reordering by God. The holy or virtuous life demands right loving in every aspect, including the bodily, even as our love begins to be directed to God. That proper telos at which the city arrives when loving is finally directed toward the ‘‘common,’’ un-private Good, who is the re-director of our loving, is intimately bound up with Augustine’s concerns about life and death. In this respect, too, the picture of bodily resurrection that ends the book is the realization and fruition of the concerns Augustine deals with here. The ‘‘right’’ end of loving is identified with life. The ineluctable result of disordered loving is the death we fear, the horrifying death that breaks the bond between body and soul and leaves the body to rot, to be dissolved back into the elements, while grief covers all.

Bodies Made Holy by a Holy Will A disordered body-soul union, a disordered relation that causes much difficulty for the embodied creature, is a component of humanity’s sentence due to sin. Augustine explains: For the soul, now taking delight in its own freedom to do wickedness, and disdaining to serve God, was itself deprived of the erstwhile subjection of the body to it. Because it had of its own free will forsaken its superior Lord, it no longer held its own inferior servant in obedience to its will. Nor could it in any way keep the flesh in subjection, as it would always have been able to do if it had itself remained subject to God. Then began the flesh to lust against the Spirit, from which conflict we are born. From the first offence of mankind comes the origin of death in us, and we bear in our members, and in our vitiated nature, the striving of the flesh, or, indeed, its victory. (13.13.555) Augustine’s understanding of the body-soul relation is worked out when, as he answers the accusations brought on by the sack of Rome, he deals with

32

marks of his wounds

the violation of sacred virgins. The premise with which he comforts these afflicted ones is assurance that the ‘‘sanctity of body and spirit alike depend solely upon the strength of a will assisted by divine aid’’ (1.29.43). Written perhaps fifteen years before his mature description of the risen body in book twenty-two, Augustine’s words about what has happened to the sacred virgins nonetheless show his understanding of the right ‘‘use’’ of the body. His description of the subjection of body to soul opens the way to think about bodies as both good and disordered. It also disturbs us with his failure to grasp the embodied horror suffered by the raped women. His consolation to them does console, but it also raises serious questions. Consider the following passage: The virtue by which life is lived rightly has its seat in the soul; that it directs the members of the body from there; that the body is made holy by the exercise of a holy will; and that, while this will remains unshaken and steadfast, nothing that another does with the body, or in the body, that the sufferer has no power to avert without sinning in turn, is the fault of the sufferer. (1.16.26) So Augustine rebukes those callous ones who would slander the victims. Purity cannot perish through the lust of another exactly because it is a virtue of the soul, but it is a virtue of the soul that makes the body holy. The bodysoul relation, for Augustine, is one in which the soul can actually sanctify the body. Raping Visigoths cannot disturb bodily purity when a holy will makes a body holy.7 The very bodily integrity of the Christian virgins can, by no other body, be taken away. The converse is also true; the ‘‘sanctity of the body is indeed lost when the sanctity of the mind is violated, even if the body remains intact’’ (1.18.28). Here Augustine is conceiving of bodies that are, in fact, holy—bodies made holy by a holy will. When Augustine discusses the ordering of body to soul in such contexts, his interest is in the ordering of the whole person to God: But the soul which is subject to God and his wisdom rather than to the body and its desire will by no means act so as to consent to the lust of the flesh because aroused by the lust of another. . . . To be sure, that lustful disobedience which still dwells in our dying members sometimes moves itself as if by its own law, apart from the law of our will: when we are asleep, for instance. In this case also, however, there is still no guilt in the body of one who does not consent. (1.26.38) Here is a great weakness in Augustine’s thought. He credits the virgins in question with withholding consent when assaulted with the lust of another, but he assumes that all flesh acts like male flesh, or, more narrowly, he assumes

the body ordered

33

that all flesh acts as he has experienced his own male flesh acting. To risk generalization, there are many, especially women, for whom the ‘‘lustful disobedience’’ of our ‘‘dying members’’ simply does not move by its own law. It is precisely and only the law of the ‘‘will’’ that allows the body to respond with delight to another. One can scarcely imagine the Roman rape victims Augustine has in mind reacting with uncontrollable lust for their assailants. Augustine’s problem of discord between body and will, his problem that comes with sleep, simply does not trouble all bodies. In any case, Augustine’s speech about subjection of flesh to spirit is meant to safeguard the need for right order and not to denigrate the body.8 While we may, as with the exact way he ‘‘comforts’’ the violated virgins, need to dissent from the precise grammar of his understanding of order, the model of right ordering remains a theological necessity for Christian speech about sanctification. When language of ‘‘flesh’’ slips into language of ‘‘body,’’ when language of ‘‘spirit’’ slips into language of ‘‘soul,’’ then right ordering also slips into problematic anthropological dualism. Still, the Pauline whole person— ‘‘flesh’’ under sin and ‘‘spirit’’ under grace—is always subject to the will.9 In a derivative sense, this may be the will of the individual Christian, but in the most proper sense, the will to which embodied persons are subject as they move toward holiness is only that of God.10 One of the most disturbing symptoms of the human condition post lapsum is the disorder of the person’s constituent parts. Even without a strictly hierarchical view of the arrangement of those parts, even without privileging male flesh, this is a useful concept. Augustine’s particular fixation with the disorder of the person is reflected in the way he describes the psychosomatic exercise of fallen sexuality as a situation in which body cannot be ordered by mind. Sexuality is the case Augustine most often has in mind when he describes the distress of body-soul disorder. Both body and mind ought to be subject to the will (and God’s will is the only case of will properly so called), but, after the fall, they are not. Alas, ‘‘now [after the fall], the flesh is in such a condition that it simply cannot serve our will’’ (14.15.613). Augustine’s discussion of the possibilities for sexuality had Adam and Eve not fallen is about exactly this. It is an imaginative construal of the goods of an embodied life rightly ordered. The naked body, in City of God, becomes disgraceful only when lust (14.17.615) begins to move the body ‘‘independently’’ of the will. The naked body of original creation ‘‘was not yet disgraceful, because . . . flesh did not yet give testimony, as it were, of man’s disobedience by disobedience of its own’’ (14.17.615).11 When Augustine reflects on sexuality in paradise, he is concerned not with any supposed evil inherent in the body itself or even in sexuality itself. Instead, his picture of sex, as it might

34

marks of his wounds

have been in Eden, shows his fixation on the idea of the perfect coherence of both body and soul with a Spiritual (that is, directed by the Holy Spirit) will. This is what it means for all to be rightly ordered. ‘‘Beyond doubt,’’ we are told, ‘‘marriage in Paradise would not have known this resistance, this opposition, this conflict between lust and will’’ (14.23.624). This is the conflict, which, for Augustine, right use of all created goods begins to bring to victory. This is the conflict which the peace of the heavenly City will have to see resolved in persons themselves, in their bodies and their souls.

On Right Use So it is becoming clear that Augustine’s way of talking about the hierarchy of soul and body, a way of talking that is very alien to us, is part of his larger concern with the ordering of the human being and the holy city toward the only good that gives life to either the individual or the ecclesial body. The ordering of body to soul is one more instance of that right order which directs the whole person to the only proper good. Given contemporary understandings of anthropology, language, mind, and body, we may want to complicate this exact account of body-soul hierarchy. But Augustine’s keen reading of the need for ‘‘right use’’ of all created goods is a conceptual move we cannot ignore if we hope to develop a Christian theology of the body. Early in City of God, when Augustine addresses those accusations against Christianity that led him to begin his project, his rejoinders include a discussion of the right use of temporal things. This discussion helps us understand Augustine’s concept of the rightly ordered body. To those who grieve over the sack of Rome, Augustine insists that, if they make ‘‘use of the world as if not using it’’ (1.10.16), then the saints ‘‘suffer no loss in losing temporal things’’ (1.10.16). It is exactly because they can be lost that temporal things present such a grave danger to those who love them with a disordered love: ‘‘The joy of such men [those whose ‘‘happiness’’ is in the empire] must be compared to the fragile splendour of glass: they are horribly afraid lest it be suddenly shattered’’ (4.3.146). The definitive example of this threatening loss is death, which constantly threatens the ‘‘fragile splendour’’ of the fallen body. Augustine’s concern is with the deep longings of the will uncovered when cities are attacked. Revealing his conception of rightly ordered loves, he comments that perhaps the tragedy of Rome has shown some that they ‘‘clung to [earthly things] with no small desire’’ (1.10.16). Augustine tries to direct his reader to that which cannot be sacked. ‘‘But these,’’ he writes,

the body ordered

35

‘‘could neither betray nor lose that good by which they were themselves made good’’ (1.10.18). The right use of temporal goods is inseparably bound up with the attainment of better goods, the peace of immortality in which death will no longer hover over God’s creation threatening that peace. When we cling to temporal goods as though they were incorruptible, not only do we lose them, as we must, but also we do not find eternal good. In the two cities, it is precisely the use of temporal goods that directs their people to two ‘‘peaces.’’ Only one peace entails the destruction of death and the embodied enjoyment of God. This embodied enjoyment, however, is no longer ‘‘fragile’’ in the way of bodies under sin. True peace will be found, unsurprisingly, only in the city that is finally ordered to God. True politics, a true city, exists only when that peace of life eternal, which is the life of the Triune God, becomes the city’s end. The peace of the heavenly city lies in order, and this can be compared with the order required for the body, as well, to be at peace. Augustine’s analogy is instructive of his overlapping understandings of ordered bodies, ordered lives, and ordered politics: The peace of the body, therefore, lies in the balanced ordering of its parts; . . . the peace of the body and soul lies in the rightly ordered life and health of a living creature; . . . and the peace of the Heavenly City is a perfectly ordered and perfectly harmonious fellowship in the enjoyment of God, and of one another in God. The peace of all things lies in the tranquility of order. (19.13.938) Perfect peace will come to the whole person, the whole city, the whole Body of Christ, when our nature is ‘‘healed by immortality and incorruption’’ (19.27.963), and all is ordered toward God. Death is the enemy that the right ordering of all things, of whole bodysoul people, finally overcomes. Augustine’s understanding of death elucidates his understanding of the body. The most crucial point to grasp here is that, for Augustine, the death of the body is in no way natural. Death is the terrible punishment of sin (13.15). Referring to fallen humanity, Augustine tells us that ‘‘human nature was so vitiated in and changed in him . . . that he suffered in his members the conflict of disobedient lust, and became bound to the necessity of dying’’ (13.3.544). Death, like sin and the disordered will, is part of the compulsory necessity of the fallen condition, always of fallen nature and not of created nature. The little Roman gods do not have power over eternal life, which, in a startling moment, Augustine says, ‘‘is the one special reason why we are Christians’’ (6.9.260). Lest we read this as a suggestion that he argues for Christianity on the basis of a hoped for ticket to heaven, we must understand

36

marks of his wounds

that this eternal life is identical with God and the life of God. The reason we are Christians is not that we may use God for a passport to life but because we enjoy God who is that very life into which we are called. Augustine maintains in strong terms that death can never be construed as a good at the time we meet it. When soul and body are separated, we suffer anguish. Soul and body belong together, and it is only a terrible force, ‘‘contra naturam’’ that can tear them apart (13.6.547). Death is always an evil, even for the regenerate. Augustine pictures the unstoppable march of time as its inescapable workings sweep us, mutable and fallen beings, closer every moment to death.12

Created Bodies, Fallen Bodies, Sanctified Bodies Any consideration of Augustine’s theology of the body must be qualified by marking the condition of that body. Augustine carefully differentiates between the created body, the fallen body, and the sanctified body. The concern to distinguish the different conditions of the body is a deeply theological one. Augustine wants his audience to get right the doctrines of creation, incarnation, and salvation. He wants there to be no mistake that the body is created good and that the fallen body is not evil itself, even though it is distorted by sin. Further, he maintains that the body, as God makes it new, is in no way a body simply returned to its original created goodness (13.23.573). Instead, it is a body transformed in holiness even beyond that of first humanity. Augustine’s insistence, astonishing in his context, that there would have been procreation even in sinless Paradise is part and parcel of his affirmation of the goods of the created body (14.23). So no statement of Augustine’s on the body can ever be taken at face value without first understanding the place of that statement in God’s work of salvation. Are we speaking of the body of Adam, good but able to sin? Are we speaking of the fallen body, plagued by the mutability which will bring it death? Are we speaking of the risen body, blessedly unable to do other than reflect the glory of God? To speak of the created body, for Augustine, is to speak of the Creator God. To grasp the created body as good is to understand something important about God’s work in creation. Some, he says, ‘‘have refused to accept with good and simple faith the good and simple reason for the world’s creation: namely, that a good God might create good things’’ (11.23.478). Augustine makes it clear that the Trinity is the origin of all creation, of materiality, and he highlights the concept that the human being, the whole person, is always body and soul.13 Soul alone can never be truly human. Against all forms of denigration of the material, Augustine holds the doctrine of creation up as a shield:

the body ordered

37

How clearly does the providence of our great Creator appear even in the body itself! . . . Even leaving aside the necessary functions of the parts, there is a harmonious congruence between them all, a beauty in their mutual arrangement and correspondence, such that one does not know whether the major factor in their creation was usefulness or beauty. (22.24.1163)14 He, who once could not accept the humble, fleshy Christ as his God,15 is especially anxious that the body be defended against those who would name it as humanity’s problem. He decisively names instead the punishment of the fall, death, as the problem that must be pinpointed. So ‘‘it is not the body, but the body’s corruptibility, which is a burden to the soul’’ (13.16.557). Again, ‘‘the soul is pressed down not by the body simply as such, but by the body as it has become by reason of sin’’ (13.16.558). Augustine drives home his point: ‘‘to obtain blessedness, therefore, we need not be rid of every kind of body, but only of the corruptible, irksome, painful, dying body’’ (13.17.561). The sinful soul made the flesh corruptible and not the other way around. The corpus animale is both the original created body and the fallen body. The resurrected body will be the corpus spirituale. We understand our bodies in both these states through the lens of the body of Christ: For the animal body is the first: the kind of body that the first Adam had, although it would not have died had he not sinned. This is also the kind of body that we have now, although, after Adam sinned, its nature was so changed and vitiated by sin that we now stand under the necessity of death. It is also the kind of body which Christ Himself deigned to assume for us at first: not, indeed, of necessity, but of choice. Afterwards, however, comes the spiritual body, which Christ Himself, as our Head, already has; and this is the kind of body that His members will have at the final resurrection of the dead. (13.23.572) Christ’s work in incarnation, death, and resurrection is of and for the body. How does Augustine understand that body as it will be when Christ saves it from mortality?

Incorruptible Bodies The bodies of the risen saints are envisioned by Augustine as at peace, in order, unable to die, and directed in all things toward God. Most of all, or perhaps exactly in order to demonstrate these characteristics, the risen bodies

38

marks of his wounds

of the saints are to be Christologically determined. The resurrected saints will be wholly holy. By their participation in the sacrifice of Christ, the very bodies of the saints become that pure body which may, because holy, be offered to God. When meditating on the bodies to come, we are to dwell on the body of the Lord even as the bodies to come will be shown to be the perfect body of that Lord. Augustine, at the end of City of God, carefully works out his doctrine of bodily resurrection in contradistinction to the very Platonic tradition that in so many ways led him to the Church. He argues that the most fitting, and, finally, honorable, resurrection is for the soul to return to its own body (4.30.439). How could the soul wish to return to this life of corruption from the life of blessedness? The life of blessedness itself ‘‘could not be the most blessed life unless its eternity were wholly certain’’ (10.30.440). Augustine turns the hope for final liberation from embodied existence on its head with the Christologically determined doctrine of bodily resurrection. There is one way for purification, and Augustine makes it clear that the purification in question is for the ‘‘whole man’’ and that it ‘‘prepares each of the parts of which a mortal man is made for immortality. We need not seek one purification for the part which Porphyry calls intellectual, and another for the part he calls spiritual, and another for the body itself; for our most true and mighty Purifier and Saviour took upon himself the whole of human nature’’ (10.32.446). Against his detractors, Augustine offers the whole person made new by the whole Christ. Augustine implies that the souls of the dead saints are, in some sense, alive in peace, but he never develops this suggestion in detail. He is certain that, whatever life souls may have in any intermediate state, it would be preferable for them to live in bodies (13.19.564). The flesh of the saints ‘‘rests in hope’’ (13.20.566) so they need not grieve the death that has separated soul from body. And what could be better than for the saints to live again in those same bodies, their very own, which were divided from their souls in death? They will receive anew their own bodies, minus blemish and sorrow (and, as discussed, this life must be imagined as one in which blemish and sorrow themselves are Christologically reconfigured). In sharp contrast to the Platonic tradition, the saints ‘‘will not desire to return to their mortal body, precisely because they will then possess that body to which they might have wished to return; but they will possess it in such a way as never to lose it again, nor to be parted from it for even the briefest moment by any death’’ (22.26.1169).16 Augustine maintains the absolute impossibility of corruption or mutability for the resurrected body, which is ‘‘entirely unable to die’’ (13.24.579). This is his concern because corruption brings the horror, the disorder, of

the body ordered

39

death. Resurrected bodies will need neither tree to protect against death, nor food to stave off hunger, ‘‘for they will be endued with the reward of an immortality so certain, and so inviolable in every way, that they will not eat except when they wish, having the power to do so, but no need’’ (13.23.569). It is of particular interest here that Augustine maintains that bodies at the resurrection retain the power of eating even though, in keeping with their utter incorruptibility, they lose the need.17 The resurrected Lord to whom these bodies refer rose as real flesh and took real food and drink. Augustine drives his point home: the resurrected body, the corpus spirituale, remains corporeal, remains flesh. In a typical formulation, ‘‘they will be spiritual not because they will cease to be bodies, but because they will be sustained by a quickening Spirit’’ (13.22.569). Through the power of God, the resurrected body does not lose its nature even though it is changed. Against Porphyry, perhaps against his own younger self, Augustine tells his reader, ‘‘What is required to ensure the soul’s blessedness, then, is not an escape from any kind of body whatsoever but the acquisition of an incorruptible body. And what incorruptible body could be better adapted to the joy of those who rise again than the one in which they groaned when it was corruptible?’’ (22.26.1168).

Putative Augustines Several common readings of Augustine’s theology interweave to give us a picture of Augustine as fundamentally antisomatic. We hear of an Augustine who is the enemy of women, who propagated in the West a distaste for the female body and for sexuality that has left us, even now, hopelessly repressed and misogynist. We hear of an Augustine who never fully converted to Christianity, remaining instead Manichean or Platonic. We hear of an Augustine who authored, for better or worse depending on who is claiming him, a brand of interiority that pressed us, seemingly ineluctably, to Descartes’s cogito. Related to all these strands of Augustine interpretation, we hear of an Augustine whose theology is inadequately grounded in Christology, a man for whom philosophy always took precedence over the incarnate God. To take one example from the many, Colin Gunton blames Augustine for an inadequate theology of creation that adversely influenced Christian thought for centuries: ‘‘Augustine allowed [Platonic forms] to displace Christ as the effective framework of the created order.’’18 My exegesis above has already called these readings into question, but I want to specifically address them here to direct attention once again to the Augustine I have been pointing to all along: a man who never looked at his own body without conflict but who, nonetheless,

40

marks of his wounds

allowed his reception of and into the body of Christ to redefine his thinking and teaching on the topic. The charge that Augustinian theology is incompatible with Christian feminism is closely related, for reasons explicated in chapter 1, to the charge that he makes sexuality and the body into filthy entities incompatible with the Christian life. For example, Kari Elizabeth Børresen maintains that ‘‘Augustine’s conversion to Christianity did not heal the rift between sexual activity and love of God, which was shared as axiomatic by Manichee Elects and Christian ascetics.’’19 Børresen contends that contemporary feminist theology must oppose Augustine because his anthropology ‘‘establishes a duality between the soul and the body and makes intellectual activity the sole truly human activity.’’20 Such claims are founded on a misreading of Augustine’s anthropology and of his driving theological concern for orderedness toward God. Augustine’s anthropology is pushed away from precisely such normative dualism at his conversion. While it may well be true that in ‘‘accidental union the body is considered as functioning solely as an instrument,’’21 Augustine maintains that human beings are hypostatic psychosomatic unities. Just so, without calling him a feminist, feminists may claim him as we work toward construing an ordered politics in which the flourishing of women is not subordinated to that of ‘‘mankind.’’22 If one construes the work of feminist theology as an unwrapping of the possibilities inherent in the deposit of faith, of God’s redemptive intention for persons of all sexes, then one need not shrink in horror from the Augustinian theology that so pervades the Western tradition. While the charges that Augustine remained ever a Platonist or ever a Manichee are two very different accusations, the two also are bound together in those who read Augustine as a dualist. During his life and up to the present day, Augustine would continue to face accusations of remaining a cryptoManichean.23 There are ambiguities in Augustine’s work, but the antiManichean texts illustrate that Augustine’s theology of the body is radically different from Manicheanism. John T. Noonan writes of Augustine that ‘‘as his knowledge of Manicheanism was greater, so was his revulsion deeper.’’24 Augustine’s positions in the Pelagian controversy are integrally related to his antidualism. Paula Fredriksen identifies Pelagianism with the ‘‘classical tradition of man’s moral perfectibility,’’ a tradition tied to a dualism that interpreted bodily things as ‘‘ ‘detachable,’ not essentially human in the way the soul was.’’25 Augustine’s late view on the body as worked out against Julian maintains that the condemnation of Adam is passed ‘‘not to bodies, but to persons, and thus, to souls as well.’’26 Claims that Augustine never transcended his Platonism,27 and thus never wrote truly Christian theology, are bound up with another influential tradition

the body ordered

41

of Augustine interpretation, the assertion that, in Augustine, we find Descartes’s roots. Here is an Augustine who authored modern interiority, an Augustine who, in Charles Taylor’s influential reading, stands in the gap between Plato and Descartes.28 The inward-turning Augustine is the antibodily Augustine, one who pushes us to ‘‘turn away from the body, in order to gain the tranquil joy of contemplation by the mind alone, unsullied by the lusts of our senses and the clamoring needs of our flesh.’’29 Taylor claims that the language of inwardness in Augustine opens up a whole ‘‘new doctrine of moral resources, one where the route to the higher passes within,’’30 but for Augustine, the route to God passes only through the external body of Christ, from whence his strong doctrine of the Church as that body, worked out in opposition to the Donatists, comes. When Augustine does turn inward, the turn only bears fruit after he has been met by that external body. In the contention that Augustine is possessed of an inadequate Christology, we come to a point where, in refuting this contention through a re-reading of the texts, we also refute the other alternative readings of Augustine discussed above. That is, if Augustine’s Christology is a full and robust Christology, then Augustine is not the enemy of woman, the lingering Manichean, the Platonist before a Christian, or the author of Cartesian interiority we meet in the literature. Is the mature Augustine of City of God inadequately Christological? If so, then feminists and all those with right worries about the various philosophical projects ascribed to Augustine above must have nothing to do with him. And yet, City of God is, structurally and theologically, punctuated by Augustine’s robust Christological assumptions. Again and again, as he describes the histories and ends of his two cities, Augustine leads his reader back to Christ the mediator, Christ the Savior, Christ who will be all in all. ‘‘No one,’’ Augustine says, ‘‘has come closer to us than the Platonists’’ (8.5.318). After all, Augustine finds in Plato that we should be made blessed by participation in God. How quickly, though, he turns to refute Platonic teaching, specifically teaching on bodies and on the body of Christ. The Platonists may be close to Christianity indeed, but still, they miss what is most essential. In the Confessions, Augustine recounts what he did and did not learn from the books of the Platonists he read in his search for truth. What he did learn is important and astounding, but what he did not find there is Christ ‘‘who was made flesh and dwelt among us.’’31 Referring to the prologue to the gospel of John, Augustine tells us both what he found and what, most importantly, he did not find in the ‘‘books of the Platonists.’’ Augustine finds the Word. He does not find the Word made flesh. He does not find the Word dwelling with humanity. He does not find the Word dying to save us. Nor does he imply these are minor omissions. Instead, everything hangs on them.

42

marks of his wounds

Augustine speaks again and again of Jesus Christ as mediator.32 It is in Christ’s role as mediator that salvation is enabled, and this, in turn, is because human beings have to be saved in the flesh. The mortality of our flesh can only be made new by immortal flesh. This fleshly mediator ‘‘showed that it is sin which is evil, and not the substance or nature of flesh. He showed that a body of flesh and a human soul could be assumed and retained without sin, and laid aside at death, and changed into something better by resurrection’’ (10.24.426). Augustine understands what would later be articulated at Chalcedon and in the outworkings of Chalcedon. The two natures of Christ are necessary to salvation, but it is Jesus Christ’s fully human, psychosomatic, nature that serves as a bridge to our own psychosomatic humanity: ‘‘He is not the Mediator because He is the Word. . . . Rather, He is the Mediator because He is man’’ (9.15.378). Augustine affirms that Christ heals the whole person: ‘‘in Him they have a most merciful cleansing of mind, body and spirit alike. For, in order that He might heal the whole man from the plague of sin, He took without sin the whole of human nature’’ (10.27.432). The ‘‘wholesome lessons’’ of the incarnation specifically reveal that flesh is not evil (9.17.383). Christ dwells in the flesh of individual Christians and in the whole body of the Church (10.3.394). Because our body and bodies thus become the temple of Christ, these bodies are also a sacrifice when ordered rightly to God (10.6.399). Augustine, when he was converted to Christianity, was also converted to a new understanding of bodies.33 He came to understand persons as irreducible psychosomatic unities. Augustine’s specific understanding of the Christologically defined resurrected body34 as necessary to our final communion with God developed as he became more and more deeply immersed in the language and practices of the Church. The one who was once attracted to the Manichean system came to hope instead for the resurrection of the body, male and female. He came to see this doctrine as central to the faith, the Christological heart on which all else depends. But Augustine did not come to this understanding of the bodily resurrection without struggle.

The Anti-Manichean Augustine and the Married Body A Manichean Psalm proclaims, ‘‘I did not make my Lord be born in a womb defiled. . . . I left the things of the body for the things of the Spirit.’’35 The young Manichean auditor would have been horrified at the thought of his Lord ‘‘in a womb defiled.’’ Here we see the special disgust reserved for women’s bodies, for the womb which is evocative of all that is most filthy and

the body ordered

43

repulsive in the realm of physicality. The Manichean culture in which Augustine absorbed himself for years was one of fundamental dualism: of light against darkness, good against evil, and spirit against flesh.36 This Manichean system or way of ordering bodies demanded the production of docile Manichean bodies,37 bodies that practiced anti-body rituals to save the spiritual from the fleshly. The basic Manichean worldview held that the very existence of matter was a consequence of evil. Augustine would come to teach the radical antithesis of this dualism; he would come, as discussed, to affirm that the end for which we are to hope rests in the resurrection of our bodies. Augustine came to conceive of sin as affecting the body, as well as the soul, as it brought with it the overwhelming disorder of concupiscence. Augustine radically came to see that the right ordering of persons would have to involve bodies, as well as souls. Why, then, does Augustine maintain reservations about the material world and sexuality? His characteristic reasoning on the topic is found in the Confessions where he discusses the way friendship, something good, may become something else all together; sin ‘‘gains entrance through these and similar good things when we turn to them with immoderate desire’’ (Confessions, 2.5.10). For Augustine, any created good (here friendship; elsewhere in the story even love for one’s mother, and, I will argue, embodied good including the sexuality that would concern Augustine throughout his writing life) may become occasion for sin when misused by a disordered human being. Immoderate or disordered desire is desire for created goods out of place with God’s creative intention. God’s creation is good, but it is not to be loved more than God. The problem is in the immoderate desire, not in the created good itself. Because Augustine’s concern is always with the proper ordering of the human being toward God, any created good may become problematic when it interferes with or is used to interfere with that right ordering. Here, we encounter the possibility of reclaiming ‘‘order’’ from the sinful orders of our culture by embracing Augustine’s concept of the ordering of persons under a countercultural norm. So, Augustine can coherently oppose the misuse of bodies while simultaneously insisting on their goodness. This double insistence, on the goodness of the body and on the possibility that it may be wrongly ordered under sin, is fully characteristic of Augustine’s bodily theology. Rather than finding it a detriment to use Augustine for feminist theologies, for theologies concerned with how our bodies can exhibit holiness and how we can protect the bodies of the vulnerable, it is of the utmost importance for constructive theological work. An instructive example of Augustine’s understanding of the need for created goods to be subject to proper order is found in his description of the

44

marks of his wounds

goods of marriage. Each of the goods is tied to Augustine’s double assertion on embodiment: that bodies are good and that, even so, they stand in need of right ordering as psychosomatic human beings are redirected toward God. In fact, the three goods of marriage serve for Augustine precisely to so order the bodies of married Christians. The good of procreation orders the bodies of husband and wife toward other people, specifically their children. Procreation disciplines the bodies of husband and wife such that they are no longer focused on themselves, turned in, but they are redirected to the good and the love of the child and so turned outward. The good of fidelity orders married bodies toward one another. Most important, the good of sacrament orders the spouses toward God. Against readings of Augustine that would make him the champion of interiority, here it is plain that Augustine insists that the embodied life of marriage must be ordered by the goods of marriage. In marriage, which might have been caught up in disordered loving, a kind of vicious amor sui in which the love of the partners becomes directed only toward the self, the goods of marriage instead reorder the spousal bodies and their loving, pointing them outward toward their neighbor, toward each other, and toward God. Against those Christians whose tendency, like that of the Manichees, was to denigrate the body and the works of the body,38 Augustine insists repeatedly that not only is marriage good, but also bodies and the things those bodies do are good. The practices of both marriage and continence involve right ordering of male and female bodies. Why, then, does Augustine hold on to continence as a greater good than marriage? If Augustine truly upheld the good of embodiment, why did he not choose the good of marriage for himself ? It is at this juncture that we find Augustine at his most conflicted. Miles emphasizes that it ‘‘is the automatic or mechanical hegemony of sexuality that disturbs Augustine. Sexuality is a ‘weight’ which continually threatens to overturn the precarious process of transmuting cupiditas into caritas.’’39 Augustine teaches the good of marriage as a viable option for Christians, but he chooses celibacy. To understand his choices and continued ambivalence, we may turn to his own experience for clues. Describing his youth, Augustine reflects: What was it that delighted me? Only loving and being loved. But there was no proper restraint, as in the union of mind with mind, where a bright boundary regulates friendship. From the mud of my fleshly desires and my erupting puberty belched out murky clouds that obscured and darkened my heart until I could not distinguish the calm light of love from the fog of lust. (Confessions, 2.2.2)

the body ordered

45

Augustine taught what he could not live. While he upheld the goodness of the body, he remained too weak to experience its delights in a rightly ordered way. It is remarkable, then, that, despite what must have been his own estimation of his weakness in this regard, Augustine continued to insist on the goodness of bodies. The Confessions contains a reconstruction of the place of bodies in rightly ordered lives.40 Augustine’s relationship with the mother of his child is a pointed example of his experience with his own disordered body. Peter Brown articulates this perfectly when he says that it was ‘‘not passion, indeed, but a haunting sense of paradox [that] hangs over the relationship. It was so near and yet so far from a true marriage.’’41 Surely Augustine’s profound experience with this woman, whose name we do not know, influenced his understanding of the right and wrong use of bodies. Augustine recalls that the ‘‘experience taught me at first hand what a difference there is between a marriage contracted for the purpose of founding a family, and a relationship of love charged with carnal desire’’ (Confessions, 4.2.2) Augustine lived with this woman, and was faithful to her, for many years. Even though they did not intend to have children, Augustine loved his son. Yet the relationship was without the ordering constraints provided by the ‘‘goods’’ of marriage, and, because of this, Augustine experienced profound pain. He poignantly describes the outcome of the relationship: ‘‘The woman with whom I had been cohabiting was ripped from my side, being regarded as an obstacle to my marriage. So deeply was she engrafted into my heart that it was left torn and wounded and trailing blood’’ (Confessions 6.15.25).42 Augustine wants us to see the terrible extent of his disordered loving. An Augustinian marriage, an Augustinian rightly disciplined body, is about more than sex. Under the discipline of the goods of marriage (and bracketing the salient issue of class), Augustine might have been freed from his own turning-inward to see his lover as more than sexual object but as partner in fides, in parenting, and in seeking after God.

The Corporeal Vision of God Returning to the final book of City of God, we see Augustine submit to the corporeal consequences of the incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection of Christ as he thinks about the visio Dei. Just what place will the body hold when the saints finally come to see God face to face? Augustine does not come to his answer easily, but he finally insists that it is integrally the whole person, resurrected in body, who sees God. In this way, he holds together vision and embodiment, undercutting a tradition on intellectual vision that not only

46

marks of his wounds

sustained him in earlier days but would hold great sway over the West for centuries to come. What does it mean that ‘‘the resurrection of the body will not take place after we have seen; on the contrary, we shall see after it has taken place’’ (20.21.1016)? Augustine tells us that he cannot know how the saints will be occupied at the resurrection. His explanation for his lack of knowledge here has to do with trusting bodily sight, with sight as an embodied activity, and with the inaccuracy of the intellectual vision. ‘‘After all,’’ says Augustine, ‘‘I have never seen it with my bodily sight; and if I should say that I had seen it with my mind—that is, with my intellect—how great, after all, is our intellect, and how can it comprehend so excellent a condition?’’ (22.29.1171). He does know, however, that at the resurrection we are ‘‘made partakers’’ of God’s perfect peace, entailing all that we have already seen about the necessity of right order, ‘‘in ourselves, among ourselves, and with God’’ (22.29.1172). Augustine cannot easily abandon the primacy of the intellectual vision; whether we will see God with the eyes of the body is no small question in the twenty-second book. He does not doubt that we shall see God with the eyes of the heart, but he still has to grapple with the hope that all flesh shall see. Immediately, Augustine acknowledges that this presents no problem if we refer it to Christ (22.29.1175), who, in the flesh, can be seen by the flesh. But Augustine is willing to press even further: ‘‘In the world to come, wherever we shall look with the spiritual eyes of our bodies, we shall then, by means of our bodies, behold the incorporeal God ruling all things’’ (22.29.1177). In this quiet statement, made without fanfare, Augustine lets go of years of struggle with the flesh. He affirms this final paradox and surrenders completely to the implications of the doctrine of resurrection. We know God now as embodied creatures. In perfect peace, we will still know God as embodied creatures. Our bodies will be made holy—that is, we embodied creatures will be wholly devoted to the praise of God: When the body is made incorruptible, all the members and inward parts which we now see assigned to their various necessary offices will join together in praising God; for there will then be no necessity, but only full, certain, secure and everlasting felicity. For all those elements of the body’s harmony of which I have already spoken, those harmonies which are now hidden, will then be hidden no longer. Distributed throughout the whole body, within and without, and combined with the other great and wondrous things that will then be revealed, the delight which their rational beauty gives us will kindle our rational minds to the praise of so great an Artist. (22.30.1178)

the body ordered

47

Here beautiful bodies are for nothing other than the praise and enjoyment of the Trinity. The very orderedness of the resurrected body becomes a hymn of praise. The frustrating opacity of the earthly body yields to a transparency which perfectly displays the doxology of eternity.

Order and Love Discussion of Augustine and the political most commonly centers on his imperial ties, especially his condoning of force against the Donatists, but bodies (particularly the use and abuse of women’s bodies), as well as armies, constitute a major topic of political import. Augustine’s understanding of the resurrection body is governed by his concepts of order and of love. For Augustine, our bodies under sin are disordered. They are caught up in the vicious amor sui which directs them toward everything but God. When our desires and our loving are reordered by God’s gracious saving activity, then we can be directed toward God. We are constituted as psychosomatic unities, and we need our bodies in order to be properly directed toward God. Drawing on the insight of feminists like Judith Butler, we may speak of an ‘‘ordering’’ of bodies under the dominion of a pernicious cultural norm; our bodies are directed, and even constructed, by the norms of our culture, norms that are harmful and sinful. We may also, as Christians, hope to speak of alternative ways of ordering for bodies, alternative ways of being embodied, and alternative norms. When we reread Augustine, we are offered a new politics: an alternative norm for embodiment emerges, offering resistance against the degradation and abuse of bodies and also a way of theologically conceiving those bodies that helps us to construct them rightly as ordered toward God. In his mature understanding, Augustine maintains that the physical body is not the enemy. It is intrinsic to being human. The enemy is death and the changeability that brings death, symptoms of the condition of sin in which we live, body and soul, with horribly disfigured and disordered love. Because being human always means having a body and a soul, the process of being reordered, of being directed to God, must involve the whole person, body and soul. Augustine does not claim to know exactly how we will participate in the vision of God, but he proclaims the embodied nature of our final goal and happiness. He affirms the resurrection of the body, male and female, in the strongest material and physical terms. Where Butler believes that our bodies are subject to the ordering of masculine hegemonies, Augustine offers us an opportunity to acknowledge the sinful character of present ordering of bodies and to

48

marks of his wounds

reclaim that ordering, to embrace the need for the right ordering of persons toward God. Much has been made of Augustine’s supposedly untenable views of sex in which he sees the embodied activity of sexuality as evil. While he is always plagued by worries about sexuality, his deepest theological concern is not with sexuality in itself. Rather, he is concerned with that disordered loving that makes sexuality vicious. While marriage and the body are goods created by God, embodied sexuality can be misdirected. God’s gracious activity reorders the whole person, our bodies and our loving, turning us toward God. Augustine’s own struggles with the particular embodied good of sexuality make his final option for the resurrection of the very same material bodies we have in this life all the more extraordinary. As normatively dualist attitudes toward bodies influence contemporary culture, and feminist critics rightly remind us that they do, Augustine’s emphases are strongly suggestive for use in a constructive theology of the body. The logic of Christian theology was ultimately what drove Augustine, and it was this that required the reevaluation of bodies that, in Peter Brown’s words, ‘‘overshadows the older, meticulously distributed vertical relationships of incompatibles—‘spiritual’ and ‘material,’ ‘angelic’ and ‘human,’ ‘soul’ and ‘body.’ ’’43 Augustine’s new relationship to God, a God most fully known in the incarnation, directed him against the mores of his culture in ways that can be appropriated for feminist theology. Thus we may claim, with Augustine, opposition to the ‘‘floods of human custom,’’ encompassing practices that do violence to (especially women’s but also men’s) bodies.44 Orderedness, for people, will always require embodiment. Because people are psychosomatic unities, we need our bodies, especially at the eschaton, in order to be properly directed toward God.

3 The Body Dying

The last enemy to be destroyed is death. —1 Corinthians 15:26 In chapter 2, I sketched an understanding of the resurrection as the ordering of human beings—body and soul—toward God. This understanding serves as a useful tool for conceptualizing a theology of the body that can cope appropriately with the feminist political concern that women’s bodies are systematically subject to brokenness. We need just such a theological account of what it might mean for the body to escape the disorder of sin, to embody goodness, in order to act on the political insight of feminism. In this chapter, John Calvin’s theological understanding of death and resurrection continues to build a narrative that may fruitfully shape a feminist theology of embodiment. In tandem with Augustine, Calvin’s account underlines the horror of death and warns against allowing the present disorder of the body to define our doctrine of redemption. ‘‘No one,’’ claims Calvin, ‘‘has made progress in the school of Christ who does not joyfully await the day of death and final resurrection.’’1 It is the interplay between the two hopes in this quotation, between hope for death and hope for bodily resurrection, that I now consider as I turn to Calvin’s voice in informing a theological account of the body. Two Augustinian concepts are central to a Christian theology of the body: the (created) body is inescapably good, and the (fallen) body is in desperate need of ordering in relationship to God. Human

50

marks of his wounds

beings stand in need of psychosomatic ordering, which will be realized fully at the resurrection. Augustine’s problem with the body is its disorder. In turning to Calvin, we continue to seek to understand the doctrine of the resurrection of the body in Christian theology.2 In subtle ways, Calvin turns from the traditional Christian theology of the body as wrought by Augustine. Here is an indication of a place where contemporary understanding of the body’s meaning sometimes goes wrong, inasmuch as the problem with bodies is identified not with disorder but with materiality. We also find in Calvin a clear picture of the enemies to be overcome in the resurrection, when bodies come to display their Christological meaning most fully. While failing to fully embrace Christian affirmation of the goodness of the body, Calvin still steadily envisions the telos of Christian existence in the redemption of the very area he finds so problematic, the body itself. In this, Calvin represents an important paradigmatic or conceptual hinge between traditional formulation of the doctrine and contemporary dismissal of the body. Although Calvin was heir to the Christian tradition of the body as created good, he also struggled with an antipathy toward the body that consistently rises to the surface in his thought. Where Augustine struggled with the body, often in relation to sexuality, Calvin was at war with the body because of its changeability and penchant for death. There are two simultaneous moments in Calvin. As he portends our own theological problems by turning from the body in a manner already identified as problematic for feminist theology, he also stubbornly clings, often against his own impulses, to affirmation of the body as inescapably intrinsic to the hope of humanity. Understanding Calvin, then, is important for understanding the theology of the body because he illumines both right and wrong ways of doing that theology.

Early Defense of the Soul Calvin wrote his first Protestant treatise, Psychopannychia, as a young man in Orleans in 1534.3 The treatise is a vehement attack on a notion Calvin attributes to the Anabaptists, the claim that the soul sleeps in the interval between death and the general resurrection.4 It is not unimportant that Calvin chose to inaugurate his career as a Protestant writer as a defender of the soul. In the very strongest polemical terms, more reminiscent of Luther than of the usually more measured Calvin, Calvin decries any teaching of the sleep of the soul as entirely antithetical to the very substance of the gospel: ‘‘When Divine Truth is avowedly attacked, we must not tolerate the adulteration of one single iota of it. It is certainly no trivial matter to see God’s light extinguished by

the body dying

51

the devil’s darkness; and besides, this matter is of greater moment than many suppose.’’5 Calvin’s method in the treatise is largely exegetical; he refutes scriptural passages used by his opponents and counters by offering passages of his own. Calvin asks human wisdom to ‘‘give place’’ to the ‘‘clear’’ proof of Scripture.6 He links the image of God in humanity specifically to the soul and maintains that image ‘‘cannot possibly be understood of the body, in which . . . his image nowhere shines forth. . . . God himself, who is a Spirit, . . . cannot be represented by any bodily shape.’’7 As discussed later in this chapter, Calvin amends this position slightly in the Institutes, but this statement still captures his overall assessment that the imago Dei is not to be located in the unworthy human body. Its domain is the soul, which thus cannot, for Calvin, ever lack consciousness. In this early text, Calvin’s attitude toward the body is ambivalent. Clearly his chief concern is with the soul, and his outrage is directed against those who would, in his eyes, defame the soul or rob it of its proper glory as the seat of the imago. Still, Calvin is embedded within centuries of tradition on the bodily resurrection; he cannot discuss the fate of the dead without mentioning the body. Sometimes this mention seems to have positive valence; at other times, as in the following quotations, it appears unabashedly negative: Both in the body and out of the body we labor to please the Lord; and that we shall perceive the presence of God when we shall be separated from this body–that we will no longer walk by faith but by sight, since the load of clay by which we are pressed down, acts as a kind of wall of partition, keeping us far away from God. . . .8 The body, which decays, weighs down the soul, and confining it within an earthly habitation, greatly limits its perceptions. If the body is the prison of the soul, if the earthly habitation is a kind of fetters, what is the state of the soul when set free from this prison, when loosed from these fetters? Is it not restored to itself, and as it were made complete, so that we may truly say, that all which it gains is so much lost to the body?9 Here, the body drags the human being away from God. Redemption is envisioned as the freeing of soul from body. This can only be jarring for the reader with Augustine fresh in mind. It is very different from Augustine’s insistence that humans are only complete as body and soul together. The implications of suggesting that redemption rests in shucking off the body are dangerous for bodies now. Later in the treatise, Calvin does affirm the bodily resurrection in quite traditional terms: ‘‘But when Christ shall have received us into his own glory,

52

marks of his wounds

not only will the animal body be quickened by the soul, but made spiritual in a manner which our mind can neither comprehend nor our tongue express.’’10 It is not enough, Calvin proclaims, to anticipate purely spiritual punishment and reward. The consequences of our present embodied lives will have to be embodied at the eschaton. Calvin anticipates a counterquestion regarding why, if the soul is happy without the body, we are to long for the bodily resurrection at all. He states his answer succinctly: ‘‘Although we are happy before the Resurrection, we are not happy without the Resurrection.’’11

The Doctrine of Resurrection in the Institutes In the Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin’s most influential and comprehensive work,12 Calvin’s distinctive theological vision emerges. While Calvin was not a systematic theologian in the modern sense, there is, nevertheless, a deeply systematic character to his thought.13 In examining Calvin on the resurrection body, we cannot turn only to that brief place where he tells us he is explicating the doctrine,14 but we must also look at the work as a whole. At the very beginning of his theology, Calvin directs his reader to contemplation of the life to come. Calvin’s whole project points the Christian believer to happiness in the knowledge of God. Whether this eschatological orientation is also a thoroughly embodied one remains an open question, even after careful and repeated reading of Calvin’s theology. This very ambiguity makes Calvin problematic. Calvin’s treatment of the doctrine of bodily resurrection proper serves as a lens through which we may focus inquiry into his conceptualization of the Christian body. When Calvin discusses the manner of the resurrection, he urges ‘‘sobriety’’ (Institutes, 3.25.8). Notably absent are those long speculations found in Augustine and throughout the medieval tradition about the specifics of the material resurrection: no digressions about cannibalized or obese bodies mar Calvin’s ‘‘sobriety’’ here. Conjectures about the material specificity of the resurrection body are not for him. He does not entertain whether such speculations are merely digressions or whether they have material importance, rooted in revelation, to proper theological consideration of the doctrine. Instead, Calvin shows oft-commented-upon ‘‘restraint’’15 when speaking of the eschaton and the bodily resurrection except in his vehement denunciation of any teaching of the sleep of the soul. Heinrich Quistorp notes that when ‘‘the question of the immortality of the soul emerges Calvin becomes animated and in fact impassioned, speaking with special emphasis.’’16 Again, Calvin’s special vehemence regarding eschatology is reserved not for the body but for the soul.

the body dying

53

Calvin’s understanding of death is central to his explication of the doctrine of bodily resurrection. With Augustine, Calvin speaks of death as the separation of soul from body. In sharp contrast to Augustine, however, Calvin envisions this separation as freeing. After having examined Augustine’s careful resistance to any such idea, as well as Augustine’s image of this separation as a dreadful tearing apart of what ought to be whole, we see Calvin’s hope revealed as a failure to understand the logic of Christian doctrine. To hope to be, literally, torn apart is anything but consonant with a gospel that hangs on the incarnation. Though Calvin also looks for the resurrection of the body, it appears a mere flat afterthought to the sundering of soul from body as the end for which Calvin hopes. But death, for Calvin, is a disaster; it epitomizes the pain of the human condition: ‘‘At the funerals of our dear ones we shall weep the tears that are owed to our nature’’ (3.8.10). Calvin urges complete orientation to the eschatological life. Again, whether that orientation takes account of the body is in question. It is clear that Calvin, perhaps even more strongly than Augustine, sees transience as one of humanity’s chief problems: Whatever kind of tribulation presses upon us, we must ever look to this end: to accustom ourselves to contempt for the present life and to be aroused thereby to meditate upon the future life. . . . Then only do we rightly advance by the discipline of the cross, when we learn that this life, judged in itself, is troubled, turbulent, unhappy in countless ways, and in no respect clearly happy; that all those things which are judged to be its goods are uncertain, fleeting, vain, and vitiated by many intermingled evils. (3.9.1) We catch echoes of Augustine in Calvin’s charge that we must be bound to either this life or to God’s future. ‘‘There is,’’ he says ‘‘no middle ground between these two: either the world must become worthless to us or hold us bound by intemperate love of it’’ (3.9.2). Calvin does insist, though, that this should not mean that we hate the present life or that we are ungrateful for it (3.9.3); instead, this life rightly rouses our appetites for that which is to be our true sustenance. While he longs for freedom from the body of death, Calvin also consistently pinpoints death as enemy, but it is an enemy which God ‘‘turns into happiness for us’’ (3.8.7). Calvin puts this in strong terms: ‘‘But monstrous is it that many who boast themselves Christians are gripped by such a great fear of death, rather than a desire for it’’ (3.9.5). Why ought we desire death? The corruption of the body is a strong motivator for Calvin. The ‘‘unstable, defective, corruptible, fleeting, wasting, rotting tabernacle of our body’’ (3.9.5)

54

marks of his wounds

certainly is a body from whence we can only desire escape. But then Calvin turns again, unexpectedly, to the body as site of our future hope. Rot will give way to firmness. Perfection and incorruptibility will suit the body for heavenly glory. Suddenly we are again on solid Christological ground, in which death is ‘‘accidental’’ and has reality only post lapsum. It is Christ who brings ‘‘restoration . . . to that self-same body which began to be mortal’’ (3.25.7). Despite his longing for separation of soul and body, Calvin also describes the reason for the bodily resurrection as ‘‘that we may lack nothing for full happiness’’ (3.25.1). Calvin specifically discusses the difficulty that the doctrine of bodily resurrection presents for human reason. Exactly because bodies are such ambivalent objects of thought—because they are associated with sin, corruptibility, and death itself—Calvin names a difficulty in maintaining that these bodies, our present prisons, are also the object of our final hope. He posits characteristic answers to this problem of reason: we may hope for the resurrection of the body (1) because of the example of Christ’s resurrection and (2) because we affirm the absolute omnipotence of God. Somewhat oddly, Calvin offers a third, natural, solution to the problem of reason posed by the resurrection; he finds (3) in human burial practice an indication that we all have some inkling that we will be raised from the dead—‘‘by an unbelievable prompting of nature men always had before their eyes an image of the resurrection. Why the sacred and inviolable custom of burial but as an earnest of new life?’’ (3.25.5). What we ought to make of this third suggestion is elucidated later when we consider the relationship between Calvin’s contested theology of nature and his understanding of the body. In placing the resurrection inextricably in Christological context, Calvin makes the single most crucial move for understanding the body theologically. Humanity is and will be completely bound up with Christ’s body, and this is necessary for redemption. Though his treatment of this facet of Christology is short in the greater context of the Institutes, he calls it the ‘‘most serious matter of all’’ and tells us: The Holy Spirit repeatedly sets before us the example of the resurrection. It is difficult to believe that bodies, when consumed with rottenness, will at length be raised up in their season. . . . Scripture provides two helps by which faith may overcome this great obstacle: one in the parallel of Christ’s resurrection; the other in the omnipotence of God. Now whenever we consider the resurrection, let Christ’s image come before us . . . he is the pledge of our coming resurrection. (3.25.3)

the body dying

55

Christ ‘‘will come on the Last Day as judge to conform our lowly, inglorious body to his glorious body’’ (3.25.3). Calvin links knowledge of Christ’s sufferings with a ‘‘grasp’’ of the resurrection (3.8.1). The resurrection, in Christ, becomes a kind of bridge to the transformation of this present life (3.9.6). The full significance of these moves, though, will not be plain without considering Calvin’s theology of the body as it relates to other doctrines.

Knowing Nature Calvin is willing, at least in some sense, to claim that the goodness of physical creation opens up possibilities for our knowledge of God: ‘‘From the beginning nothing at all has existed in which God has not put forth an example both of his wisdom and of his righteousness’’ (1.14.3). In considering Calvin’s doctrine of creation as it relates to his understanding of the body, we cannot ignore the organization of the Institutes around the category of knowledge. At the outset, we are confronted not with creation as such but with our knowledge of God the Creator.17 The problem of the status of the natural knowledge of God in Calvin is one with a contested history.18 Without directly taking on this history, examining the place of this natural knowledge illumines his eschatology. In his treatment of the knowledge of the Creator, Calvin begins to use a favored image for human relationship to God, the image of vision. God ‘‘began to show himself in the visible splendor of his apparel, ever since in the creation of the universe he brought forth those insignia whereby he shows his glory to us, whenever and wherever we cast our gaze’’ (1.5.1). The noetic is inseparably linked to the optic. We know God through our senses, understand the divine in what we see. Calvin images union with God as a process involving the soul and the knowledge of God. He speaks approvingly of this idea as he understands it from Plato: ‘‘When the soul has grasped the knowledge of God, it is wholly transformed into his likeness’’ (1.3.3). But humanity degenerated from true knowledge, knowledge that might have brought the soul into union with God. Broken, human beings ‘‘do not therefore apprehend God as he offers himself, but imagine him as they have fashioned him in their own presumption’’ (1.4.1). Calvin’s image of vision functions beautifully here as he imagines this twisted knowledge ‘‘extinguishing the light of nature’’ (1.4.2).19 Calvin’s description of optic and noetic distortion intertwines with the plan he will offer, in the Institutes as a whole, for its correction. ‘‘The final goal of the blessed life,’’ Calvin tells his reader, ‘‘rests in the knowledge of God’’ (1.5.1). Does human hope rest in the happiness found at the resurrection of the body? Does it rest in

56

marks of his wounds

cognitio alone? Are the two intertwined in any way? Must knowing God in what we see be tied to a psychosomatic redemption? For Calvin, the natural knowledge or vision of God does not profit us in our brokenness.20 We are as those infected with a disease, trapped in a mire of error, with minds blinded, minds like a labyrinth. The mind falls and slips into forgetfulness of God. And ‘‘so does an immense crowd of gods flow forth from the human mind’’ (1.5.12). Were we taught by nature alone, we would have nothing solid to hold, nothing but a false god. Surely the key to understanding Calvin on natural knowledge of God is contained in his insistence that right knowledge of God is born only from our obedience (1.6.2). With senses made new, we may know and see God where God has shown and made known God’s self. This, though Calvin does not make the connection, is precisely the hope of a bodily resurrection, that the senses may function as they ought, to bring us into the holy life of God. Still, we are left in Calvin with a certain private or individual inward turn. The believer experiences this right knowledge within the self (1.7.5). Happiness is not clearly something separate from interior knowledge: God’s powers are actually represented as in a painting. Thereby the whole of mankind is invited and attracted to recognition of him, and from this to true and complete happiness. Now these powers appear most clearly in his works. Yet we comprehend their chief purpose, their value, and the reason why we should ponder them, only when we descend into ourselves and contemplate by what means the Lord shows in us his life, wisdom, and power. (1.5.10) Here the body disappears. The bodily life of community disappears. Calvin pushes his reader to accept that Christ must dwell within the individual. There is no body here. Christ’s work on and for the body is not under consideration.

Anthropology Calvin’s anthropology also relates to his doctrine of the resurrection of the body. In Calvin’s understanding of the human being, we meet a tension between the classical Christian affirmation of person as psychosomatic unity and a dualist concept of person. On the one hand, the body is conceived as good; on the other, the person appears as a noble soul loosely related to a debased and problematic body. Calvin compares the unity of body and soul with the union of the two natures in Christ (2.14.1). Still, he frequently portrays the body in simple negative terms, for example, as a prison.21

the body dying

57

This same Calvin deplores an Aristotelian understanding of body and soul in inseparable union: Since the soul has organic faculties, they by this pretext bind the soul to the body so that it may not subsist without it, and by praising nature they suppress God’s name as far as they can. Yet the powers of the soul are far from being confined to functions that serve the body. . . . These are unfailing signs of divinity in man. (1.5.5) Calvin forwards a basic two-part anthropology, human being as body and soul, as ‘‘beyond controversy.’’ It is the terms of the ‘‘and’’ which will determine the adequacy of any anthropology for a Christian theology that coheres with the doctrine of bodily resurrection. Calvin goes on to say very little about the body but a great deal about the soul. This soul is ‘‘an immortal yet created essence, which is his [the human being’s] nobler part’’ (1.15.2). We cannot understand Calvin’s anthropology without attending to three salient words in this description of soul: 1. The soul is immortal. It is so closely related to the divine that, as we have seen in Calvin’s early work, to suggest its death is unthinkable. 2. The soul is created. Calvin is no more a strict Platonist than Augustine. His Platonism is subject to his Christianity in such a way that he can posit no part of the human being which is not a creature and thus contingent.22 3. The soul is the nobler part of the body-soul person. Here is where Calvin’s anthropology shows itself as normatively dualist. Soul has priority over the body in every way. The soul, and not the body, is imprinted with the all-important knowledge of God.23 It is the seat of Calvin’s hope for the future; the body appears as that which binds the human being to fallen, mortal life. Calvin claims that ‘‘when the soul is freed from the prison house of the body, God is its perpetual guardian . . . while men are tied to earth more than they should be they grow dull; indeed, because they have become estranged from the Father of lights (1.15.2). Calvin is preoccupied with the soul as immortal. His concern is that the soul be truly separable from the body.24 The soul is conceived as ‘‘set in the body, it dwells there as in a house’’ (1.15.6). Where in Augustine we saw an insistence on the hierarchical ordering of soul and body, Calvin takes this much further. He insists, instead, that the soul’s attachment to the body is loose, almost accidental. Human flourishing, reaching toward immortality, is fundamentally an intellectual activity, an activity proper to the soul (2.1.1).

58

marks of his wounds

Calvin’s concept of the person stresses the dangers that assail us from every side, and in this, he points to the corruptible and vulnerable body as an obvious example of the daily threats of death that surround us.25 In the anthropology of the Institutes, Calvin’s ambivalent position on the body is problematic. His person is constituted by the future for which she longs but is also constituted by sin, a sin implicated with ‘‘flesh,’’ a flesh that is, at least some of the time in Calvin, caught up with bodies themselves.26

Created Nature, Fallen Nature Understanding the human being, for Calvin, always depends on also understanding the state in which we find that being: Is she in created nature, fallen nature, or re-created in grace?27 Human ‘‘nature’’ is not a univocal term. There is a primary sense in which original created nature must be protected against any insinuation of defect that would impinge on the author of that nature. Created nature is always good because it comes from a good God. So when Calvin turns his reader to the knowledge of human nature, he tells us that ‘‘knowledge of ourselves is twofold: namely, to know what we were like when we were first created and what our condition became after the fall’’ (1.15.1). Calvin’s infamous dark outlook on fallen nature, his picture of human beings in a state of sad ruin in which our nature is corrupted and deformed, can only be rightly seen against the bright background of his understanding that human nature, at creation, was the good gift of God. Fallen humans seek always to be flattered, but true knowledge of our nature, created and fallen, strips us of any pretense. The problem comes, then, when we see that Calvin fails to distinguish between these different states of nature when it comes to the body. He is perfectly clear that there is an immense difference between created human being, fallen human being, and redeemed human being, but he fails to link the body so closely to humanness as to notice the difference, so marked in Augustine, between created bodies, fallen bodies, and redeemed bodies. Calvin seems to forget that the body can ever be anything but fallen. He misses his own best teaching on the different states of nature when he looks at the body of death.

Nature in the Image of God When, in the Institutes, Calvin treats the image of God in humanity, he attacks Osiander, to whom he attributes a physicalist understanding of the imago. Still,

the body dying

59

Calvin backpedals from the complete exclusion of body from the image of God that he maintained in Psychopannychia. He gives clear priority to the nonmaterial, but he admits some place for the body: ‘‘Although the primary seat of the divine image was in the mind and heart, or in the soul and its powers, yet there was no part of man, not even the body itself, in which some sparks did not glow’’ (1.17.3).28 Clearly, the soul continues to take the most important place in Calvin’s description of what it is that makes a person in the image of the God. Just prior to the begrudging concession to the body quoted above, Calvin attributes immortality, reason, and intelligence to the soul and excludes those same qualities from the body. The soul, not the body, has this character, and it is these properties of the soul that distinguish human beings from other animals, which enable human beings to identify themselves as created in the image of God. Before the fall, ‘‘God’s image was visible in the light of the mind, in the uprightness of the heart, and in the soundness of all the parts’’ (1.15.4). Calvin is clear that the image is corrupted and deformed at the fall and so the human being depends wholly on Christ (1.15.4). This renewal, unsurprisingly if it is foremost to be a renewal of the intellectual properties of the soul, begins first with knowledge. Still, it seems strange to make a Christological renewal as thoroughly disembodied as Calvin seems to imagine it.

Restoration of Nature Calvin unmistakably elevates the role of the mind (and denigrates the body) in the person’s most important activity, the quest to know God. It is clear that the restoration of fallen human nature is central to the Christian life and that this restoration will be complete only eschatologically. Calvin urges his reader to grasp that consideration of our ‘‘first condition’’ should yield meditation on the immortality to come, and Calvin incites his reader’s desire to ‘‘yearn after the kingdom of God’’ (2.1.3). Nature is to prompt us to long after grace. Adam’s sin, for Calvin, is conceived as disobedience or unfaithfulness, a fault that resulted in his spiritual life being separated from God. Calvin wants to make it clear, though, that original sin does not come forth from the substance of either flesh or soul. He carefully guards himself here against what he understands as a ‘‘Manichean’’ denigration of the body as source of sin. Sin is inherited not because the components of the person are evil, but because God ordains this inheritance (2.1.7). Thus we are bound, and we want to wallow in the depths of sin. Soul and body alike are corrupted, and the effects on the spiritual part of the person are described vividly: ‘‘Unspeakable impiety occupied the very citadel of his mind, and pride penetrated to the depths of his

60

marks of his wounds

heart. Thus it is pointless and foolish to restrict the corruption that arises thence only to what are called the impulses of the senses’’ (2.1.9).29 Calvin is clear about the holistic effects of sin, but he is less clear about the holism of redemption. Without the healing that comes from Christ, ‘‘something of understanding and judgment remains as a residue along with the will, yet we shall not call a mind whole and sound that is both weak and plunged into deep darkness’’ (2.2.12). The nature that the fallen human being cries out for Christ to renew is here the nature of the soul with its intellectual properties. Because he does not imagine the difference between created and fallen bodies, Calvin does not imagine the possibilities for redemption of the body. Fallen nature is, in its entirety, that flesh which brings no profit to its bearer. The mind, property of the soul, is blinded; the senses, belonging to the body, are perverted, but hope for the restoration of nature is narrowly focused on knowledge, intellect, and the soul.

Knowledge and Vision Calvin understands the possibility for human participation in God as an intellectual activity. ‘‘Faith,’’ Calvin says, ‘‘rests not on ignorance, but on knowledge. And this is, indeed, knowledge not only of God but of the divine will’’ (3.2.2). Calvin offers a definition of this faith the foundation of which is knowledge: ‘‘We call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit’’ (3.2.7). What is entailed in a faith defined as knowledge? Barbara Pitkin has argued that Calvin is distinguished from Augustine by his understanding of the role of intellect in human sin.30 While Calvin is involved in traditional debates about the freedom of the will, he also emphasizes reason as fallen. Calvin’s Eve and Adam are united in ‘‘desire for illicit—i.e., unmeasured—knowledge; the first sin consists of a voluntary ‘movement of the mind.’ ’’31 Calvin shifts the focus of the fall from the will to the noetic character of sin. Pitkin also carefully examines Calvin’s concept of faith as a special kind of spiritual perception opening new ways of knowing and seeing.32 She stresses that Calvin’s knowledge of God is not restricted to the intellect. Faith corrects the blindness of sinful humans, and ‘‘the question of what needs to and can be known about God is fundamentally the question of how God appears to eyes healed by faith.’’33 Certainly, the healing of the senses is a powerful understanding of redemption, but are Calvin’s healed eyes only spiritual and not physical; does his noetic emphasis exclude the physical character of redemption?

the body dying

61

Calvin’s favored images for describing the human condition and the possibilities for our knowledge of God revolve around this ambiguous visual. He uses, again and again, pictures of the eye, of light and darkness, of that which we can see and of that to which we are blinded. Calvin describes the fallen human being as nearly entirely blinded to the knowledge of God, blinded save for occasional flashes, which are too brief to point a way forward.34 Revelation, for Calvin, corrects our vision, enabling us to begin to see.35 This point is important for understanding his hopes for our final vision of God. Revelation helps us to see, and God provides mirrors36 to reflect the divine glory. But Calvin, in righteous apophaticism, is also extremely circumspect about the embodied possibility of the human being seeing God. This emerges most clearly in his stance against images.

Idolatry, Images, and Anti-Catholic Polemic Calvin’s concerns over images and idolatry are deeply bound up with his understanding of materiality. Faith, for Calvin, must involve mental work, mental assent. Here the material Church as body of Christ conflicts for Calvin with the necessary and immaterial noetic activity of faith, activity bound to the soul and not to the body. ‘‘God’s glory,’’ says Calvin, ‘‘is corrupted by an impious falsehood whenever any form is attached to him’’ (1.11.1). Calvin’s condemnation of images is integral to his turn to Protestantism and to understanding his articulated theology on the body and the bodily resurrection.37 Calvin insists that the material world cannot properly reveal the immaterial God. He explains Old Testament instances of material revelation as indicative, first of all, of God’s ‘‘incomprehensible essence. For the clouds and smoke and flame although they were symbols of heavenly glory, restrained the minds of all, like a bridle placed on them, from attempting to penetrate too deeply’’ (1.11.3). Rather than viewing the material as a means of God’s availability to Israel, Calvin interprets it in a radically apophatic manner. The cloud and the flame, he claims, did not bring God near but rather warned against any attempt to enter into the transcendent. The Catholic Church, says Calvin, would have no need of images as teacher of the unlettered if only the Church taught rightly: ‘‘Whatever men learn of God from images is futile, indeed false’’ (1.11.5). Calvin warns that images diminish the fear of God and increase error (1.11.6). ‘‘For surely,’’ cries Calvin, ‘‘there is nothing less fitting than to wish to reduce God, who is immeasurable and incomprehensible, to a five-foot measure! And yet custom shows this monstrous thing, which is openly hostile to the order of nature, to

62

marks of his wounds

be natural to men’’ (1.11.4). Here, Calvin again raises the contested terms of nature. He deems the presence of the divine in the material unnatural and the desire to find the divine there natural to (fallen) humanity. The naturalness of such a need to created humanity as a properly psychosomatic being is not admitted, nor is God’s possible accommodation to that psychosomatic nature.38 The implications for Christology are dangerous. Contrast the sentiment with a later hymn, which celebrates ‘‘our God contracted to a span, incomprehensibly made man.’’39 In light of the incarnation, Charles Wesley reverses the order of incomprehensibility and concrete, finite, materiality as we see it in Calvin. Calvin puts his concern in the starkest of terms, terms in which what is at stake in his prohibition of images becomes plain: ‘‘Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols’’ (1.11.8). What we see is empty. There is no revelation there. What we touch is not real. There is no access to God in the tactile or, it seems, by way of the body’s eyes. For Calvin, visual arts are gifts with a legitimate use, but their use must be circumscribed. They cannot depict the divine, because we cannot, properly, see the divine: ‘‘Only those things are to be sculptured and painted which the eyes are capable of seeing: let not God’s majesty, which is far above the perception of the eyes, be debased through unseemly representations’’ (1.11.12). The Christological question that seems demanded at this point, much less anything resembling Augustine’s final submission to the hope of seeing God in the resurrected body, is bracketed entirely.

Calvin’s Christ Calvin has been accused of failing to grasp the full logic of the Chalcedonian definition, of holding a Nestorian Christology. How do the bases of such accusations interrelate with Calvin’s ambivalence on the doctrine of bodily resurrection? As discussed, Calvin begins his exposition of the Christian faith by entering into understanding of God, not in the fleshly particularity of Jesus of Nazareth but much more generally: ‘‘Nothing is more characteristic of God than eternity and self-existence’’ (1.14.3). If, with Calvin, we allow scripture to circumscribe our speculation about the knowledge of God, how is God made known to us? What we know of God must be constrained by God’s own selfrevelation which is, itself, radically accommodated to our finite nature (1.13.1). Our knowledge of God as Trinity is a divine self-marker that sets God apart from general human speculation, doomed by our finite and fallen nature, on the divine being.40

the body dying

63

For Calvin, Christ became human to fulfill the office of mediator. Death our enemy is overcome in him alone, and Christ’s two natures are soteriologically necessary for the destruction of death. All of this is perfectly consonant with the best of the tradition on Christology. The natures exist without confusion, and Calvin’s chosen explanation is revealing—both of his understanding of Christ and of his understanding of the body-soul relation in the human being: The most apposite parallel seems to be that of man, whom we see to consist of two substances. Yet neither is so mingled with the other as not to retain its own distinctive nature. For the soul is not the body, and the body is not the soul. Therefore, some things are said exclusively of the soul that can in no wise apply to the body; and of the body, again, that in no way fit the soul; of the whole man, that cannot refer—except inappropriately—to either soul or body separately. Finally, the characteristics of the mind are [sometimes] transferred to the body, and those of the body to the soul. Yet he who consists of these parts is one man, not many. (2.14.1) At hand is the right understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, the very issue that results in accusations against Calvin of Nestorianism. Calvin strongly defends the real body of Christ against any docetic interpretation: ‘‘We trust that we are Sons of God, for God’s natural Son fashioned for himself a body from our body, flesh from our flesh, bones from our bones, that he might be one with us’’ (2.12.2). His point is an ancient soteriological one: Christ must have had a body like ours to save bodies like ours. This gives positive valence to the body. Calvin’s distinctive understanding of the body of Christ in the supper closely relates to his overall theology of the body. Gary Macy, in his history of eucharistic theologies, has pointed to the way that teachings on the Eucharist tie in with the questions of grace, ecclesiology, and justification central to the Reformation.41 Indeed, Macy’s own theological preferences are illumined in his particular way of narrating this centrality around ‘‘diversity’’ of eucharistic teachings. Diversity is a good for Macy, and, for him, the sixteenth-century eucharistic controversies represent a lamentable ‘‘diversity denied’’ and an equally regrettable option for materialism related to the reception of Christ’s body. Theological debate about Calvin’s doctrine of the supper has always revolved around whether he opted for the materialism that Macy regrets. Understanding Calvin’s position in the eucharistic controversies of the sixteenth century requires understanding the late medieval Catholic picture of the Eucharist through which the reformers developed their own eucharistic

64

marks of his wounds

doctrines. Francis Clark42 finds that, while abuses existed, they were neither so widespread nor so horrifying as the polemic of the reformers would lead us to believe. He thus concludes that the reformers had a theological program that broke profoundly with medieval Catholic teaching, a program connected to central understandings of grace, justification, and ecclesiology. For Clark, this program rested in a denial of the whole incarnational perspective of Catholicism, in a denial that grace can be mediated materially to humanity. The reformers, Clark claims, opt instead for a humanist understanding of the spiritual relationship between the individual and God. The result is that Ulrich Zwingli is the true heir, not only of eucharistic Reformation theology, but of the Reformation itself, and that Luther’s insistence on the real presence is foreign to his thought. I approach Calvin here through a very different understanding of Luther. Luther’s clinging to the physicality of the sacrament is a moment in his thought that is inseparable from his Christology.43 Christ must be objectively present in the elements because human works cannot call his presence forth. For Luther, the physical character of the sacrament guarantees Christ’s presence for the forgiveness of sins. The supper becomes the food that transforms our bodies; its material result is the resurrection. Against any aversion to materialism, Luther understands the material as central to salvation. Luther’s defense of the real presence is central to the sola fide, the sola gratia of the Reformation. Luther spilled the cup in serving and, moving the congregation to tears, fell to his knees to drink it up.44 This Luther is problematic for Calvin. If it is Christ who is at stake, we can easily see why Luther reacted so fiercely against the spiritualizing teaching of Zwingli. Zwingli held a strict dualistic separation between the spiritual and the physical; material elements could never confer grace. We can only look at Calvin’s self-consciously mediating position in the context of Luther’s battle with Zwingli. Calvin taught a spiritual real presence of Christ in the supper, and persistent controversy over this teaching has been about its very ambiguity. What is a spiritual real presence? What relationship does it bear to the real body of Christ?45 Calvin was never a pure Zwinglian; he always maintained the agent of the supper is God and not humanity. Still, his association with Zwinglian language and the repudiation of images made him suspect to Lutherans. While Calvin’s language sometimes suggests a very concrete understanding of the real presence in the supper, he could not accept the materialist Lutheran terms. In his thought on the sacraments, Calvin’s concept of the body is fraught with ambiguity. Wherever Calvin upholds the real body of Christ, he is also concerned that Christ not be bound to body:

the body dying

65

Let nothing be withdrawn from Christ’s heavenly glory—as happens when he is brought under the corruptible elements of this world, or bound to any earthly creatures. . . . Let nothing inappropriate to human nature be ascribed to his body, as happens when it is said either to be infinite or to be put in a number of places at once. (4.17.19) Clearly, this ambivalence is at the heart of Calvin’s characteristically ambiguous understanding of what transpires in the supper. Calvin warns against a Zwinglian deprecation of the body of Christ, but he is also opposed to what he construes as an overly physicalist Lutheran understanding of the elements as body and blood.46 In a summary statement Calvin provides, we are still left at a loss to understand his teaching on the supper clearly: ‘‘Our souls are fed by the flesh and blood of Christ in the same way that bread and wine keep and sustain physical life. For the analogy of the sign applies only if souls find their nourishment in Christ—which cannot happen unless Christ truly grows into one with us, and refreshes us by the eating of his flesh and the drinking of his blood’’ (4.17.10). Calvin persistently divides the human being so sharply into separate body and soul that it seems that the supper is for only one part of the person and not the other: ‘‘Just as bread and wine sustain physical life, so are souls fed by Christ’’ (4.17.1).47

Shadows of Modernity All of the doctrinal loci examined above—from Calvin on nature to Calvin on the Lord’s Supper—reveal an ambivalence about the body implicated in those modern normative dualisms which underwrite denigration of the body. A clear picture of Calvin’s theology of the resurrection of the body emerges from the background of traditions against which he formulated his own ideas on the body and the resurrection. In her work on Calvin’s beliefs about nature, Susan Schreiner comments on the motivation behind Calvin’s view of providence: ‘‘The foundations of the late ‘medieval’ world had crumbled. The portals of change had been opened and threatened to sweep everything away. In the face of such chaos, Calvin encouraged his audience to hold to the Word of God.’’48 The ambiguity we see in Calvin’s doctrine of the bodily resurrection, an ambiguity that follows from Calvin’s strict understanding of the separation of body and soul, places Calvin conceptually between this traditional background and the modern world that followed on his heels. I am not suggesting that Calvin is somehow a causative link between, say, Augustine and Descartes. Calvin is part of a broader movement of change which, as

66

marks of his wounds

discussed in chapter 2, clearly separates Augustine from Descartes. Calvin is not clearly separate from either. He takes up many of the emphases of the tradition epitomized in Augustine, from the goodness of creation to the Christological determination of the human being. Simultaneously, he begins to slip away from Augustine’s Christian synthesis on the resurrection of the body. His fascination with humanism, his leaning toward the interior, individual subject, and, above all, his normative anthropological dualism mark him as a man living in a new age.

Death and Disorder Reading Calvin on the body reveals significant ambiguity. In his early Psychopannychia, in his Institutes, and in his distinctive thought on the body in questions about the sacraments, we see both affirmation and rejection of the body. In the final analysis, Calvin does not know what to make of the body because he splits it off from the human being. Because he views sin as an intellectual problem, not, as for Augustine, a problem for the whole person, he cannot envision the redemption of the whole person. While Calvin pays lip service to the goodness of creation, he cannot account for it adequately when he turns to redemption because the body has already been discounted as peripheral to being human. Where Augustine sees all of creation, material and spiritual, as disordered by sin and, thus, subject to the penalty of death, Calvin equates the body with death. For Augustine, our problem is the disorder of the whole person, to be overcome for the whole person in grace. Calvin is not so clear; instead, it seems that our problem is materiality itself. But Calvin perfectly pins down the enemy of the embodied life. That enemy is death. Perhaps above all else for Calvin, our lives as embodied creatures remind us that we are constantly confronted by death—that we are never stable or safe but are always hovering at the edge of the abyss of mortality: Innumerable are the evils that beset human life; innumerable, too, the deaths that threaten it. We need not go beyond ourselves: since our body is the receptacle of a thousand diseases—in fact holds within itself and fosters the causes of diseases—a man cannot go about unburdened by many forms of his own destruction, and without drawing out a life enveloped, as it were, with death. For what else would you call it, when he neither freezes nor sweats without

the body dying

67

danger? Now, wherever you turn, all things around you not only are hardly to be trusted but almost openly menace, and seem to threaten immediate death. (1.17.10) This man who suffered so much illness,49 who lived his life as a refugee, was excruciatingly aware of the fragility of life in the body. Immersed in the life of Christian faith, he did not fail to pinpoint the source of hope for persons so burdened: ‘‘The victory of our faith over death lies in [Christ’s] resurrection alone’’ (2.16.13). At times, he sets forth this hope with the greatest clarity. ‘‘Let them,’’ Calvin cries, ‘‘either deny the resurrection of the flesh or grant that Christ, clad in heavenly glory, did not put off the flesh, but that, since we are to have a common resurrection with him, he will make us partners and companions of that same glory in our own flesh’’ (4.17.29). This sometime clarity, however, is marked by deep ambiguities, ambiguities born of Calvin’s own struggle with the flesh and his hesitation to allow flesh to be qualified, not first by his own ill body but primarily by that of the risen Christ. Can we, trembling with Calvin in the face of the disorder of death, hope as Calvin hopes? Can we be shaped toward a properly Christological form of holiness if ‘‘there will be no one hereafter who will reach the goal of true perfection without sloughing off the weight of the body’’ (2.7.5)?50 In Calvin’s deeply ambivalent relationship with the human body, he stands between Christian confidence in the bodily resurrection and untenable dismissal of the embodied life. Because of his theological commitments, Calvin maintains the goodness of the body and upholds it as integral to our final hope. Still, the very corruptibility of the body, known intimately by Calvin, pushes him to suspicion and even disparagement of the body. Even while he wants to confirm the tradition’s affirmation of the body, he is careful to maintain that that our hope for bodies is that they will be very unlike bodies as we now know them. For Calvin, the bodies we know in this life leave us ‘‘immersed in death,’’ but our future happiness is tied to the body: For if heaven is our homeland, what else is the earth but our place of exile? If departure from the world is entry into life, what else is the world but a sepulcher? And what else is it for us to remain in life but to be immersed in death? If to be freed from the body is to be released into perfect freedom, what else is the body but a prison? If to enjoy the presence of God is the summit of happiness, is not to be without this misery? (3.9.4) For if we deem this unstable, defective, corruptible, fleeting, wasting, rotting tabernacle of our body to be so dissolved that it is soon renewed unto a firm, perfect, incorruptible, and finally,

68

marks of his wounds heavenly glory, will not faith compel us ardently to seek what nature dreads? (3.9.5)

Calvin felt this body loathing, but his theological commitments led him to a final affirmation of the body, Christologically determined, as the locus of our hope: We must come to this remedy: that believers should be convinced that their only ground of hope for the inheritance of a Heavenly Kingdom lies in the fact that, being engrafted in the body of Christ, they are freely accounted righteous. For, as regards justification, faith is something merely passive, bringing nothing of ours to the recovering of God’s favor but receiving from Christ that which we lack. (3.13.5) Calvin’s experience with the dying body poignantly draws attention to the enemy overcome in the resurrection. Yet Calvin also exposes possible pitfalls for a constructive theology of the body—the dangers of allowing a normative dualism to determine theological anthropology and of failing to recognize that the body of death does not tell the full story of the body. The resurrection body, in overcoming the body of death, reveals God’s creative and redemptive intentions for human embodiment.

4 The Body Raised

So it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. —1 Corinthians 15:42–43 Attending to Augustine and Calvin on the resurrection bears fruit for a constructive theology of human embodiment that takes the concerns of feminist politics with utmost seriousness. Together, Augustine and Calvin help us understand the creedal confession of the resurrection of the body. Their emphases and concerns are instructive for our attempt to comprehend the human body as it refers to the risen Christ. In incarnating orderedness toward God, the resurrection body overcomes the disorder of death. The resurrection body overcomes the disorder of sin. It overcomes the disorder of all those gendered, raced, and classed forms of violence against bodies that are revealed through a feminist analysis of normative dualism. Where Calvin longs for the separation of soul and body, Augustine desires to see God through the ‘‘spiritual’’ eyes of a body transformed. This disparity rests in their different reactions to quite similar uncertainties about the body, uncertainties born of their respective intellectual contexts and experiences with vulnerable bodies. Calvin’s hesitance in claiming embodiment as integral to redemption is paradigmatic of that turn away from bodies disturbingly evident in our contemporary context, so problematic for Christian

70

marks of his wounds

feminist theology. Read together, Augustine and Calvin offer a glimpse into right conceptualization of the human body; together, they warn against problematic accounts and point to proper theological description of the body. One critical place where these two theologians aid in the articulation of a theology of the body is found in their different habits in speaking the grammar of body and soul. Where Augustine explicitly understands the human being as body-soul unity, Calvin’s account tends toward body-soul dualism. The burden of this chapter is to make explicit what has already been implied in reading Augustine and Calvin. To conceive redemption rightly, a quite specific understanding of the body-soul relation, rooted in the Church’s affirmation of Jesus Christ as Lord, is requisite: human beings are psychosomatic unities. Christian theology needs a body-soul grammar that allows proper speech about sanctification as it is to be consummated at the resurrection.

The Human Creature as Psychosomatic Whole Calvin and Augustine, along with the vast majority of those throughout time who have tried to think theologically about what it means to be human, assumed that human creatures are composites of body and soul. This is no longer an uncontested assumption. The theological and ethical concerns sketched in chapter 1 demand a way of speaking about body and soul that is consonant with the doctrine of bodily resurrection. What manner of Christian anthropology takes the redemptive claims entailed in the doctrine of bodily resurrection with adequate seriousness? As I have suggested, one key to such an anthropology is a sound understanding of what the ‘‘and’’ means if I claim, ‘‘I am a composite creature, body and soul.’’ Before crafting a position on what that ‘‘and’’ ought to mean, let us first examine the apparent available options: (1) the ‘‘and’’ lacks truth or ontological status; (2) the ‘‘and’’ is a sharp divider; or (3) the ‘‘and’’ is a strong connector. The first option for understanding the body-soul relation has become dominant in many scientific, philosophical, and theological circles: The ‘‘and’’ between ‘‘body’’ and ‘‘soul’’ is deceptive. This ‘‘and’’ lacks any referent in reality. The position is just that, when I claim, ‘‘I am body and soul,’’ I am mistaken. There is nothing but the body. To speak rightly, we must speak of human beings as bodies, full stop. Human beings are constituted by materiality. Positions labeled ‘‘monism’’ or ‘‘materialism’’ are included in this way of speaking about people as bodies alone. In this view, Augustine and Calvin, along with most theologians belonging to the Christian tradition, were working with inadequate philosoph-

the body raised

71

ical and anthropological categories. Inasmuch as the coherence of their thought depends on those categories, it must, presumably, be discarded along with language for soul. Some quite important concerns are at stake here. First, many who advocate a grammar for human being in which language for soul is rejected are concerned about consonance between theology and the natural sciences. Convinced, for example, by the findings of neuroscience that mental events have physical correlates in the brain, many have adopted a materialist anthropology. Second, ethical concerns with affinities to the feminist challenge outlined in chapter 1 of this volume have persuaded some to shun the language of soul. If soul language has been used in the service of hierarchical ethics, has been marshaled to defend the dehumanization of those associated with the body, then, many conclude, it must be discarded at all costs. The next option is generally construed as competing with the first. This second way of speaking about the body-soul relation allows more precise specification of the destructive implications of normative body-soul dualism. While there might be a variety of meanings for the word ‘‘dualism,’’ the dualism implicitly rejected in my readings of feminist politics, Augustine, and Calvin is that of this position: The ‘‘and’’ between ‘‘body’’ and ‘‘soul’’ is a divider. This ‘‘and’’ marks a sharp disconnection between two separable and differentially value laden entities. Features of these dualisms, dualisms in which ‘‘and’’ can only divide body from soul, include the assumption that the soul, and not the body-soul composite, is the real human being, the tendency to discount the importance of bodily life to human flourishing, and an ethically untenable hierarchization of body and soul in which the body is denigrated. In such dualist accounts, I have a body but am in no essential way my body. In identifying this second grammatical option for the body-soul relation with dualism, I maintain an important distinction; there is a difference between dualism and difference. Ethically inexcusable normative ‘‘dualism’’ is equated with this second option, ‘‘and’’ as divider between body and soul. The dualism that produces broken bodies is of this sort. This leaves room for another alternative, one in which we can still speak meaningfully about a difference between soul and body while unequivocally rejecting the problematic implications of dualist politics. We come, then, to a third grammatical option, one that can include a variety of philosophical ways of specifying the body-soul relation. In this view, we insist that in claiming ‘‘I am body and soul,’’ the ‘‘and’’ must be understood as indicating connection in the strongest possible sense. This ‘‘and’’ is indicative of real unity.1 I believe that some version of this third option makes the most sense for a theological understanding of human beings as creatures intended

72

marks of his wounds

for sanctification. I also caution against attempting to construct a theological anthropology by defining human beings as their parts or even as the sum of their parts. While understanding ourselves as psychosomatic unities presents a variety of theological advantages, the particular created relationship between humanity and God is all that makes us human. Increasingly, contemporary thinkers are turning to some version of this third option, rejecting both strict materialism and radical dualism. We find various arguments for a grammar for body and soul in which ‘‘and’’ is understood as indicative of an important unity. Before sketching the grammar of this third option in greater detail, I consider several conceptually possible versions for construing the body-soul relation as one of unity: holistic dualism, hylomorphism, and nonreductive physicalism.

Holistic Dualism and the Intermediate State John W. Cooper argues for a ‘‘holistic dualism’’ in which body and soul are understood as logically separable entities that nonetheless are properly so closely united that human being can in no way be understood without reference to composite body-soul wholes. Cooper presents a variety of biblical arguments for understanding humanity in this way.2 Still, Cooper argues, some form of what he labels ‘‘dualism’’ is entailed by the existence of a conscious intermediate state between death and the general resurrection. In Cooper’s ‘‘holistic dualism,’’ body and soul may be separated in an intermediate state but are not normally separable. Both this life and redeemed life are lived in psychosomatic unity before God. Much of Cooper’s work involves exegesis attempting to demonstrate that acknowledgement of an intermediate state is biblically requisite. For Cooper, in fact, belief in an intermediate state is a ‘‘mark of orthodoxy,’’3 and his biblical commitments are augmented by appeals to Christian piety and general belief that loved ones, after death, exist with Jesus until the resurrection. Cooper insists that the immortality of the soul does not exclude the resurrection of the body, and he argues that there are no necessary connections among various forms of dualism. Calvin and Augustine are both ‘‘dualists’’ in something like the minimalist sense proposed by Cooper. We remember that Calvin, too, was concerned to defend a conscious intermediate state between death and the resurrection. Both have ways of talking about a difference between body and soul while also affirming the resurrection of the body. Cooper’s proposal for ‘‘holistic dualism,’’ however, goes further in pressing body-soul unity than Calvin went. The proposal explicitly excludes Calvin’s view of the soul as the nobler part of the person, the only part with meaningful relation to God.

the body raised

73

Holistic dualism insists that human psychosomatic unities, not human souls problematically bound to problematic bodies, are what stand in relation to God. Though he argues for the separability of body and soul at death, Cooper characterizes his position as a ‘‘functional holism’’ in contradistinction to an ‘‘ontological holism’’ which must entail monism.4 Such a position shows one potential way of conceptualizing our third grammatical option, viewing ‘‘and’’ as strong connector between ‘‘body’’ and ‘‘soul.’’

Aristotelian Hylomorphism and the Thomist Synthesis Where ‘‘holistic’’ dualism continues to be committed to a form of substance dualism, there are other possibilities for conceiving the unity of body and soul. Another way of understanding ‘‘and’’ as indicative of body-soul unity is found in Thomas Aquinas’s appropriation of Aristotelian hylomorphism together with Augustinian anthropology. For Thomas, the soul is not a substance on its own.5 The whole person is one thing, a unity. And each thing has only one substantial form. The human being is not two substances in relation. For this reason, Aquinas’s account of body and soul is perhaps a better guard than holistic dualism against reading the ‘‘and’’ between body and soul as anything but unifier. The Aristotelian or Thomist option for conceiving the body-soul relation understands human beings as essential unities of body and soul.6 There is, of course, no unity without difference, but it has well been argued that the Thomist conception of difference is categorically different from that radical dualism that would set soul and body in opposition and make bodily life accidental to humanness. Tellingly, Calvin explicitly rejects an Aristotelian understanding of body and soul exactly because it ‘‘binds the soul to the body so that it may not subsist without it.’’7 Thomas describes souls as necessary to human existence but never as sufficient for such existence. The word ‘‘hylomorphism’’ indicates that the thing under consideration is composed of both ‘‘stuff ’’ (hyle) and ‘‘form’’ (morphe). So, for Thomas, the soul is the form of the body.8 The soul is both ‘‘first principle of life’’ and ‘‘incorporeal and subsistent.’’9 Eleanor Stump describes Thomas’s ‘‘form’’ as the ‘‘dynamic configuration or organization’’ of matter.10 Unlike an artifact, which ‘‘is configured only with an accidental form,’’11 people are substances; people are one thing, not two, in the very strongest of senses. Thomas brings together Augustine’s qualified Platonic understanding of subsistent soul with Aristotle’s hylomorphism. In fact, it is on the authority of Augustine that he draws (he references City of God 19.3) as he considers ‘‘whether the soul is man’’ and gives what he understands as a fully Augustinian answer: ‘‘Man is not a soul only, but something composed of a soul and

74

marks of his wounds

body.’’12 The intellectual soul, endowed with both understanding and feeling, is fittingly united with a body that can feel. Thomas expressly rejects an account of person as soul-using-a-body on the grounds that human beings are the sort of creatures that receive knowledge through the senses. Equally, because we are body-soul unities, we have no direct access to knowledge, including knowledge of God, outside of our senses, outside of our embodied lives. The soul is not the real person using an accidental body. It is not in the body in the same way I am in my study.13 The soul is that which makes the body a body in the first place. It is also that which makes this body a particular human being, which makes my body me. The soul is not, Thomas tells us, united to the body ‘‘merely as a motor.’’14 Body and soul are so united that corpses, no longer informed by souls, can only be called ‘‘bodies’’ equivocally.15 Without its informing soul, my dead body is no longer properly a human body at all. I have no body apart from my soul, and, because the soul is united to the body as its form, ‘‘it would have been unfitting for the soul to be created without the body.’’16 Thomas draws a picture of body and soul so integrally knit together as to be conceptually inseparable. We are not surprised that Thomas defends a traditional doctrine of the bodily resurrection not unlike Augustine’s.17 Thomas explicitly links his account of human psychosomatic unity to the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. Because we are composite beings, we must be freed from death in both soul and body. He defends resurrection doctrine by appealing to his synthetic account of being human. The soul is ‘‘naturally united to the body’’ as the body’s form. It is contrary to nature for the soul, released from the body at death, to be without the body, ‘‘but nothing which is contrary to nature can be perpetual. . . . Therefore, the immortality of souls seems to demand a future resurrection of bodies.’’18 The natural unity of body and soul must be carried forward from creation into redemption, and Thomas provides a coherent account for a body-soul grammar in which the two are always held together. What is more, Thomas’s concept of soul thus accounts not just for intellectual identity between the person now and the person resurrected. This soul provides material identity between the body now and the body raised—it is that which makes matter a particular human being.19 Thomas’s hylomorphism makes room for material identity without requiring the reassembly of bits of stuff envisioned by Augustine.

Nonreductive Physicalism Proponents of ‘‘nonreductive physicalism’’ also advocate for a view of human nature in which body and soul are truly united. Nancey Murphy places this

the body raised

75

position on a continuum of options as follows: (1) radical dualism, (2) holistic dualism, (3) nonreductive physicalism, and (4) eliminative/reductive materialism.20 It seems obvious to Murphy that the first and fourth options are incompatible with Christian revelation. Strongly convinced by scientific findings in evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, she and colleagues present a case for a nonreductive physicalism on theological and scientific bases. I have suggested a spectrum of options built around the grammar we use to talk about body and soul rather than around the ontological categories Murphy advances. Nevertheless, thinkers working within the nonreductive physicalist framework use the kind of grammar of human psychosomatic unity I have proposed. While rejecting the idea of a substantial soul separable from the body, proponents of nonreductive physicalism are willing to talk about ‘‘soul’’ in a way that can only make sense if the ‘‘and’’ between ‘‘body’’ and ‘‘soul’’ is a connector of the strongest sort. What is meant by ‘‘soul’’ here will be illuminated by some references. Murphy defines nonreductive physicalism as the ‘‘claim that we are our bodies, yet without denying the ‘higher’ capacities that we think of as being essential for our humanness: rationality, emotion, morality, free will, and, most important, the capacity to be in relationship with God.’’21 Warren Brown describes soul as ‘‘a physiologically embodied property of human nature.’’22 This soul is ‘‘the net sum of those encounters in which embodied humans relate to and commune with God (who is spirit) or with one another in a manner that reaches deeply into the essence of our creaturely, historical, and communal selves.’’23 Ray Anderson uses soul language ‘‘to denote the inner core of the whole person, including the body. By ‘soul’ I mean the personal and spiritual dimension of the self.’’24 Pointing to the biblical witness, Joel Green presses on us a picture of humanness not only holistic but also inescapably relational and communal; Green insists as he exegetes that ‘‘human beings cannot be understood in their individuality.’’25 Together, advocates of nonreductive physicalism speak about human beings in a manner coherent with our third option for the grammar of body and soul. Here, ‘‘soul’’ becomes purely grammatical.

Whatever the Soul Is A grammar of body-soul unity has deep implications and repercussions for a theological anthropology. It upholds the claim that God’s redemptive action is upon us as psychosomatic unities. I have sketched three conceptually viable ways of speaking of the body-soul relation as one of the strongest sort of

76

marks of his wounds

unity. Only one of the three, or some other option not clearly conceived by us, can obtain.26 But this ought not prevent us from working out a way of speaking about body and soul and living our embodied lives consonant with all that is implied in the confession of bodily resurrection. In each of the three ways of speaking of body-soul unity surveyed, the soul is conceived differently. In holistic dualism, we still have a minimal account of the soul as separable substance. In Thomism, the soul is the immaterial form of the body. In nonreductive physicalism, ‘‘soul’’ names something like an emergent property of cognition or the relational capacities of human beings. With all three accounts, however, body-soul unity is taken with the utmost seriousness. While only one option can have ontological status, all three point us to one grammar that will shape the sanctifying practice of the Church. All three recognize the claims of Christian doctrine, claims about incarnation and resurrection, which push us to use such a grammar. All can agree that we must speak of human creatures as psychosomatic unities. The human creature is one thing. The problematic ethics attendant on normative dualism—on speaking of the human creature as two things, one good and one bad—are avoided in proposing a common grammar consonant with resurrection doctrine. A grammar of unity allows proponents of the different options to come together around proper ecclesial catechesis and practice. Whatever ontological status the soul finally turns out to have, there are certain ways of speaking about it that will help us uphold the important theological concerns entailed in affirming the psychosomatic unity of the human being. Whatever ontological status the soul turns out to have, the language of soul has served an important function in theological systems and in Christian piety. Augustine, for example, marshals that language in service of his crucial concept of the need for human lives to be properly ordered toward their Redeemer. Many Christians understand this language to refer to a self-conception that they are related to God. It thus seems judicious to grant something to such language rather than trying to expunge soul-talk from Christian worship and practice. Because of the specter of normative dualism, however, it will be vital to build a high hedge against antisomatic dualism around Christian speech about the soul. Whatever the soul is: (1) Soul is not necessarily limited to human animals. That is, there does not have to be, supposing the accuracy of something like a Darwinian account of evolution, an evolutionary leap between protohumans and humans in which God unaccountably endows humans with a soul. Aristotle’s account of hylomorphism, for example, assumes that all living things have souls.

the body raised

77

(2) The soul is not eternal. Nor does speech about the soul necessitate the existence of an intermediate state. Biblical and traditional witness on the question of an intermediate state is, at best, mixed. Aquinas argued for the incorruptibility of the soul and the continued existence of the separated soul.27 Calvin defended the intermediate state; Luther advocated a version of soul sleep between death and the resurrection. Advocates of positions akin to Luther’s point out that such a position takes seriously the horror of death as death, the reality of death. Voices in favor of an intermediate state point to the thief on the cross. Unless we start inserting qualifications about time and eternity, the usual understanding of the communion of saints also depends on an assumed intermediate state. The question of the intermediate state must be left among those things about which Christians may disagree in good conscience. It cannot settle the status of the soul. But the possibility of calling the soul properly eternal is not mixed; such a proposition is never a sound option. While the soul may or may not continue in an intermediate state between death and the resurrection, the soul does not exist in its own right. Souls, like bodies, depend for their existence at every moment on God. Even Calvin, who eagerly defends the soul’s immortality, reminds us that it is created and always contingent on the divine will.28 Only God is uncreated, only God is eternal in His own being, and it is God who holds everything in existence. Souls have no independent status outside of this. (3) The soul is not meant to be separable from the body. I lean toward explanations of the body-soul relation which maintain that the soul is never separable from the body, but in acknowledging that the question of an intermediate state is one on which Christians can faithfully disagree, we also acknowledge that it is possible, under the condition of sin, that the soul is separated from the body for a time between death and the general resurrection. Such a separation would always be, as Augustine and Thomas remind us, a result of a ‘‘terrible force, ‘contra naturam’ ’’ (CD 13.6.547), a grotesque ripping apart of the created whole. Thomas maintains that such an unnatural state can never be permanent. The severing of the body-soul whole could only be a circumstance contrary to normal human nature, a condition not only impoverished but also grievous. By rightly acknowledging death as thus sorrowful, as contrary to nature, we move with Calvin to take seriously the full measure both of its horror and of God’s triumph over it in the resurrection. (4) Soul is not identical with mind. That is, we need to understand a clear demarcation between the Cartesian mind-body problem and Christian speech about bodies and souls. Whatever the soul is, it includes much more than socalled rational thinking. We have seen that Thomas draws on the soul’s rational and emotional nature as explanation for sensible embodiment. Important

78

marks of his wounds

questions about the status of infants or handicapped persons are implicated in this caveat. The infant child is no less human because she lacks developed intellectual capacities. On Thomas’s account, for example, her very human soul informs her very human body just as the most intellectually accomplished philosopher’s soul informs her body. Neither human bodies nor human souls can be understood in their individuality. The soul of the infant child is intertwined with those who love and care for him. Warren Brown puts it like this: ‘‘The persistent relationship of the family and community to an individual, even within the context of severe cognitive disability, continues to endow the individual with significant experiences of personal relatedness and soul.’’29 Some have defended a radical substance dualism on the basis of ethical concerns related to this point. The soul must be the real human being, the argument goes, because infants do not have developed brains and Christians, historically at least, want to insist on the infant’s status before God.30 The argument presumes that the body important to those advocating body-soul unity is only the brain. If we assume that the sheer givenness of the body, perhaps especially of the infant body or the broken body, is essential to being human, the objection loses ground. The reminder that we cannot understand any features of our human life outside of the body, apart from our psychosomatic unity, takes human vulnerability, suffering, brokenness, and dependence as serious and, in many ways, determinative conditions of our lives.31 What is important about human creatures is not soul/mind/brain but the relation-in-community of the whole to God. This point relates closely to the next. (5) It is not the body and not the soul but our particular psychosomatic relationship to God that makes us human. This point further clarifies point one above. Human beings are, first of all, creatures of God. Like God’s other creatures, we are constituted by God and related to God by sovereign intention. Whatever the difference might be between us and the dolphins, gorillas, and dogs, it needn’t be explained by our constitution as psychosomatic unities.32 God intends human creatures for a special relationship with God: ‘‘The true greatness of man is not found in his being the highest biological existence, a ‘rational’ or ‘political’ animal, but in his being a ‘deified animal.’ ’’33 This particular relationship, our communion with God as God makes us holy, only happens in and through our constitution as body-soul wholes. The traditional way of talking about what makes us human is lodged in the biblical concept of the imago Dei. Many attempts have been made to pinpoint the image of God in us. Does it consist in our rational capacities? A theological danger lurks in attempts to nail down some property of people that makes us people; such attempts almost inevitably exclude some human beings

the body raised

79

from being human.34 As human creatures, our relatedness to God cannot depend on, for instance, rationality, if I expect the Church to take me seriously when I claim that my infant child is human. Ian McFarland suggests that the imago must refer ‘‘not to some thing within us, but to some one [Jesus Christ] outside of us’’ if we are to be ‘‘freed from trying to justify our status through the critical examination of others or ourselves.’’35 Whatever we mean by ‘‘soul,’’ we cannot hope to understand it, ourselves, or our common life before God apart from the body and the embodied life. The body, apart from which we cannot understand human salvation, is never only the individual baptized body but is always also the ecclesial body of Jesus Christ. In another example of Christian speech about being human that depends on a grammar of body-soul unity, Karl Barth takes this Christological starting point most seriously. Barth speaks of the human creature as ‘‘soul of his body—wholly and simultaneously both, in ineffaceable difference, inseparable unity, and indestructible order.’’36 Next, Barth makes a crucial move. In Jesus, all that belongs to the body and all that belongs to the soul are united: ‘‘What is there in Him which is only inner and not outer, sensuous and not rational? What does soul or body mean for Him to the extent that either implies an importance or function of its own, different from and opposed to the other?’’37 Jesus is one subject in what he does for humanity. The human being, body and soul united, is one subject in her response to Christ.

A Body-Soul Grammar for Sanctification In advocating a grammar of unity, I draw a Christological reference in two quite different ways: (1) as we see in Barth, our psychosomatic unity is real because it is real in Christ—as He is truly one subject, body and soul, so are we—and (2) the natural unity of body and soul in humanity can be described on an analogy to the hypostatic union. Many voices in the tradition have used the analogy in the reverse, advocating understanding the hypostatic union through the body-soul union in the human being. 38 For Augustine and for Calvin, human beings are body-soul entities united in such a way as to be comparable to the indissoluble union of the two natures of Christ. Calvin, in trying to describe the union of Christ’s natures, offers the following: The most apposite parallel seems to be that of man, whom we see to consist of two substances. . . . Yet he who consists of these parts is one man, not many. . . . Thus, also, the Scriptures speak of Christ: they sometimes attribute to him what must be referred solely

80

marks of his wounds to his humanity, sometimes what belongs uniquely to his divinity; and sometimes what embraces both natures but fits neither alone. And they so earnestly express this union of the two natures that is in Christ as sometimes to interchange them.39

Augustine also tries to help readers imagine the hypostatic union of the Lord by referring them to the body-soul union that constitutes them; he reminds readers that each is a composite creature in which each part retains its own character and need for right order. The concept of the communication of attributes among the natures of Christ gives us a place to begin thinking analogically about our psychosomatic sanctification. God holds body and soul in unity, and the attributes of the body are communicated to the soul and those of the soul to the body. Because God has made human creatures such irreducible unities, we relate to God as such, and God redeems us as such. How could the Church explain both the worship of Jesus as God, of one being with the Father, and the claim that this Lord’s soteriological agency rests on a humanity shared with all people? In answering this question, the definition of Chalcedon provides grammatical rules for discussion of the hypostatic union of the two natures of this very particular Lord, fully God and fully human. In claiming the hypostatic union as a teaching analogy for understanding human beings as psychosomatic unities, several features of the Chalcedonian definition help to lend clarity. First among these features is the nonnegotiable oneness of Jesus as the second person of the Trinity. Jesus is the ‘‘selfsame one,’’ perfect in both his natures. His divinity is not his ‘‘real self ’’ using an ancillary body. The hypostatic union is not of divinity and a body but of divinity and full, psychosomatic humanity. Jesus is one Lord in such a way that there would have been no human nature and hence no body had there been no Lord. The one Lord’s own psychosomatic unity is given soteriological weight. It is part of the way in which he is ‘‘of the same reality as we ourselves.’’ This one Lord, as psychosomatic as well as hypostatic unity, saves us body and soul. The two natures of Jesus Christ are united without confusion and without transmuting one into the other. Augustine’s careful understanding of the proper order of body and soul, discussed at length in chapter 2, depends on this grammatical rule. The interpreter of Chalcedon is not permitted to erase the difference between the natures of Christ. Jesus’ divinity is not his humanity; his humanity is not his divinity. In an analogous way, my body is not my soul, and my soul is not my body. The two natures of Jesus Christ are also united without division and without contrast according to area or function. This is the other side of the previous rule. Jesus’ divinity is not separate or separable

the body raised

81

from his humanity just as my body is not separate or separable from my soul. While body and soul are different, they are united in such a way that no gap stands between them. Just as we cannot divide the works of Christ and ascribe suffering to Jesus’ human nature and saving to his divine nature, we cannot divide our own life before God by ascribing, for example, our relatedness to God to our souls and our sexuality and love of macaroni and cheese to our bodies. I discuss this further in this chapter when I examine the significance of the communicatio idiomatum. The analogy between human psychosomatic unity and the hypostatic union is a helpful illustration, but it, like all analogies, breaks down. The second person of the Trinity can exist without a body in a way that the human soul, if human beings are truly psychosomatic unities, cannot. While the suggestion that we understand the body-soul union through the lens of the hypostatic union is only analogical, it offers real safeguards against the misunderstandings of dualism. Cyril of Alexandria developed his understanding of the hypostatic union in working through the grammar of some of the most conceptually difficult and evangelically necessary Christological statements. How dare we say, ‘‘Jesus is Lord’’? He is very human, a Jew from Nazareth. He is the same one about whom they said, ‘‘Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?’’ (Matthew 13:35). How dare we say, ‘‘God suffered’’? Is God not immutable? Is God not constant and faithful to His promises? Is God not the one who creates out of nothing? In conceptualizing a Christology that answers these questions, Cyril understood his Christology to also affect correct understanding of the sanctification of all human beings as embodied souls. Cyril wrote against the Christology of Nestorius, a teaching in which the preferred description for the relation between the two natures of Christ was as a junction or association rather than a union. Pressing the analogy between the hypostatic union and human psychosomatic unity, a ‘‘Nestorian’’ anthropology might also be a normatively dualist anthropology: body and soul are closely associated but not essentially united. In On the Unity of Christ, Cyril describes the incarnation as the means by which embodied human beings are brought into the life of God and thus transformed or sanctified. Christ is one, Cyril insists, and so we must predicate of this one both eternal existence and birth ‘‘after the flesh in these last times.’’40 The union of human and divine natures in Christ does not confuse the two natures, but ‘‘signifies the concurrence in one reality of those things which are understood to be united.’’41 And so the most scandalous of claims become Christologically indispensable; not only did the flesh become Christ’s ‘‘very own,’’ the weakness of the flesh became his ‘‘very own.’’42 Suffering itself belongs to this one subject; even the suffering body belongs rightly to the one Jesus for the simple

82

marks of his wounds

reason that ‘‘it was his own body which suffered and no one else’s.’’43 The crumbling corruptible body that caused such turmoil for Augustine and for Calvin is affirmed by Cyril as truly God’s. If this were not the case, Cyril reminds us, we could not hope that our weak, death-prone bodies will one day be redeemed.44 In addition to the basic grammar for distinctiveness in unity provided in the definition of Chalcedon, our understanding of the concept of the hypostatic union is heightened by the premise of the communicatio idiomatum. The hypostatic union is the sort of union in which the two things united therein communicate attributes. Because they are one in virtue of this union, the two things so united share all they have. If we continue to speak of the body-soul relation on the analogy of the hypostatic union, then we may speak of a communication of attributes between body and soul in the human being. The two are so united that whatever we claim of one may be claimed of the other. The redemption of my body will sanctify my soul. As my soul comes under the control of the Spirit, so will my body. Augustine insists that holy continence, a property of the soul, ‘‘sanctifies the body itself ’’ (CD 1.18.28). The human being is redeemed as indivisible psychosomatic whole. We need speech that recognizes the way God redeems us as embodied souls. We understand body and soul to be united in a manner analogous to the union of divinity and humanity in Christ, the sort of union that realizes true unity and not mere association. This is the sort of union in which, if we predicate something of one component, we may properly predicate that something of the other component and of the composite whole. This proposal grows out of the reading of Augustine and of Calvin and out of the biblical and theological concerns they raise. At the same time, the proposal goes beyond Augustine and Calvin to speak to our contemporary context and to the ethical claims of feminism.

Imagining the Redeemed Body and the Vision of God Both Calvin and Augustine understand the problem with the body, the problem to be overcome in the resurrection of all flesh, as one of mutability.45 As the changeability of the body sweeps human life ineluctably toward death and decay, Augustine and Calvin posit hope for a stable body, one unswervingly fixed in glorifying God. While Augustine does not always extricate bodily mutability from his suspicions that it is tied to our sexuality, Calvin precisely pinpoints the problematic of mutability: we die. It is the horror of death, death our enemy, that prompts Calvin to shrink away from the body. As we learn to

the body raised

83

do theology in conversation with Augustine and Calvin, we must claim (1) Calvin’s strong identification of our enemy with the horror of death alongside (2) Augustine’s strong understanding that human relation to God always requires rightly ordered embodiment. With both Augustine and Calvin, we witness hope for the vision of God as central to eschatological imagination. What can it mean for creatures constituted as psychosomatic unities to hope one day to see God face to face? A theology of that final vision cannot be separated from the theology of the body. The concept of vision functions in multiple ways. Vision can be bodily and trustworthy or interior and deceptive.46 It can be a metaphor for fundamental divorce between the putative material and spiritual, or it can serve as an important placeholder in our thought, expressly forbidding any such separation. At their best, both Augustine and Calvin point us to this second way of thinking about the vision of God. Neither does so without due consideration. Calvin points to redeemed vision as the way we know God; Augustine points to the fundamentally embodied character of the ones who will see. In Calvin’s theology, we saw the predominance of the visual in his ways of thinking about human access to God and the eschatological consummation of the relationship between Creator and creature. The glories of creation become, in Calvin, a work of art in which we may perceive, even with the eyes of the body, the power of God. Calvin portrays the human condition as one of being adrift in a veritable sea of visual markers of the Creator. Everywhere we turn our eyes, we ought to discern the grace of God written on the world. Calvin’s apophatic sensibilities warn us away from vain attempts to know the essence of God; instead, Calvin points us to the economy where we may ‘‘contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself ’’ (Institutes, 1.5.9). The problem is that the human being set in this panorama of God’s splendor fails to discern the truth from what she sees. Grace must heal the eyes if we are to hold out any hope of seeing rightly. Calvin warns against artistic representation of the divine exactly because he takes the power of the visual so seriously (1.11.12). In a striking moment, he counsels rejection of idolatrous images created by humanity so that the Church may concentrate her gaze on baptism and the supper, ‘‘by which our eyes must be too intensely gripped and too sharply affected to seek other images forged by human ingenuity’’ (1.11.3). On the model of body-soul union proposed here, cleansing of the bodily vision purifies spiritual vision as well. The regenerate psychosomatic creature sees, with her purified bodily eyes, something different from what that same creature under sin sees. The key to claiming Calvin’s understanding of the redemption of our vision lies in an insistence that the healing of our vision is

84

marks of his wounds

never only spiritual; it is physical and spiritual, exterior and interior. It works on us as psychosomatic wholes. Augustine is working out of a solid grasp of human creatures as bodysoul unities when he proclaims to us that we will see only after the bodily resurrection (CD 20.21.1016). He sets forth a reminder that the intellectual part of us, even for the most skilled, is weak and limited and in no way capable of comprehending the beatific vision. For this reason, he insists we wait for that bodily sight that is trustworthy because it is material, physical, and sensible (22.29.1171).47 Our bodily eyes will be made spiritual, redeemed by the Holy Spirit, and then we will, ‘‘by means of our bodies, behold the incorporeal God ruling all things’’ (22.29.1177). Augustine pushes beyond the quite necessary claim that we will behold, in our bodies, the immaterial God in the embodied Christ. He maintains we will also behold that immaterial God, in our bodies, beyond the embodied Christ. He rightly claims not to know what such a vision will entail, but, in his claim that it is the rule of the immaterial God that we will see, is a suggestion that we will still know God by His works, that the whole redeemed creation, including the ecclesial body of the saints, will lose that opacity that hides God post lapsum and become instead a transparent window to the fullness of God.48 For Augustine, his trust that God saves us in the body allows him to imagine our redemption. He insists that our spiritual flesh will include the actual material stuff of our bodies now, that the psychophysical unities in which we come to know God in this life will be the material vehicles of our enjoyment of God. He imagines an eschaton that is not only restored to the unspoiled state of first creation but also is transformed beyond Eden. Offering pastoral consolation, he imagines a time when the fear and vulnerability of the corruptible body will be wiped away. He imagines a moment when the body in which we are who we are ‘‘shall be given back and made whole in a moment of time’’ (1.12.21). He exhorts his people to imagine with him the glories of God’s transformative work. He recounts the beauties of present creation and then pushes us forward to new creation: And all these things are only the solace of the wretched and condemned, not the rewards of the blessed! What, then, will those rewards be if the consolations are so many and so great? . . . When this promise is fulfilled, what shall we be? What shall we be like? What good things shall we receive in that kingdom, since already we have received Christ’s death as an earnest of them? How wonderful will the condition of man’s spirit be then, when it no longer has any vice at all. . . . How wonderful will the body’s condition be, when it

the body raised

85

will be in every way subject to the spirit, by which it will be made so fully alive as to need no other nourishment! (22.24.1165) Here Augustine rejoices in a future totally, spirit and body, redeemed. Calvin’s less solid concept of integral union of body and soul limits his ability to imagine eschatological existence. His noted reticence about the end leaves us with a colorless hope. It seems we cannot imagine what we cannot see, hear, and touch.49 The Spirit uses robust eschatological imagination to allow redeemed existence to begin to stretch back into the here and now and nudge our sinful bodies into God’s future. Calvin’s insistence on holiness requires a willingness to imagine God’s redemptive action for bodies and souls. While eschatological imaginings must always be qualified under the conditions of sin, we must also summon the courage to risk such imaginings. We must be bold enough to trust that we may become, in the Spirit, faithful imaginers when our hopes for the future are bound to the body of Christ. This is possible because the Spirit gives us concrete and tangible access to that body in the Church and in the sacraments.50 An act of such imagination will be the project of the final chapter.

This page intentionally left blank

5 The Body Sanctified

Just as we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will also bear the image of the man of heaven. —1 Corinthians 15:49 In this concluding chapter, I gather up the concerns of earlier chapters in order to explore how the doctrine of the bodily resurrection makes sense of our bodies. Christians only come to understand what our bodies are for as God reworks us, psychosomatically, into a tangible challenge to the inevitability of brokenness. As we become holy, body and soul, we learn the right shape for embodiment from Jesus Christ. I hope to forward an inescapably embodied eschatology. And proleptically, the Church will have to think corporately about how that eschatology must, if the Church is that of the Spirit who is Sanctifier, filter backward into our present embodied lives, making our bodies, in Christ, both a ‘‘living sacrifice’’ and a ‘‘new creation.’’1 God intends bodies for visible holiness. In chapter 1, I explicated feminist ethical concerns about the body, which must be accounted for in a theology of the body that seeks to address systematic brokenness. But dealing with that brokenness by claiming the body is completely a construction leaves us without hope. While recognizing that bodies are subject to power, we still need to claim a normative political hope, the hope of the peace of God. Chapters 2 and 3 drew on Augustine and Calvin as aids in understanding what shape the body might take as we long

88

marks of his wounds

for God’s peace. The broken body of sin and death stands in need of God’s ordering as it is made a material part of that peace. Chapter 4 presented a grammar for speaking plausibly of how God makes us, embodied creatures, holy. Presupposing that grammar, this final chapter envisions the ethics of the claim that God makes human creatures holy only as psychosomatic unities. This psychosomatic unity excludes those dualist concepts that would underwrite violence against the body. In this last chapter, I imagine the shape of the holy body as revealed to us, not first through creation, but through redemption. We cannot fully understand our bodies outside of grace; our bodies meet their true nature only as they are taken up into grace, as they are transformed in relationship to the risen Christ whose body still bears the wounds of crucifixion. The resurrected body, available to us in Jesus Christ, begins even now to make our bodies holy. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body is about the holiness of the body of Christ. When God judges and tears down our sinful, disordered ways of being embodied, holy bodies will be left in God’s wake. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection means that when God saves God’s people, God does it by reshaping them as psychosomatic wholes. In Jeremiah, the prophet goes down to the potter’s house and sees the ‘‘vessel he was making of clay was spoiled in the potter’s hand, and he reworked it into another vessel, as seemed good to him’’ (18:4). God then speaks a word about the corporate body: ‘‘Just like the clay in the potter’s hand, so are you in my hand, O house of Israel’’ (18:6). The affirmation that we are clay, dust of the earth, is central to what it means to be embodied. God’s shaping of the people reworks the body of death into something that visibly displays God’s holiness. The holy bodies of the saints, the holy body of the Church, become the material antithesis of the violence and brokenness that mark us under sin. The gendered body serves as my illustration for imagining psychosomatic holiness. I do not intend to argue that gender is central to redemption. Rather, gender serves as a test case for understanding the importance of material particularity to redemption. True, it might be a particularly unimportant test case on the other side of redemption, but it is a terribly important one to grapple with in the here and now.2 Preoccupation with gender may be a mark of the fall, but it is one we cannot ignore given the realities of life together under the condition of sin. To demonstrate what is at stake, I consider two primary options for understanding the redemption of gendered bodies. In the Christian East, gender difference has been seen as something to be obliterated in salvation. Augustine offers a starkly material and very different option to the West: male and female bodies are the stuff of God’s natural intention for humanity and must therefore

the body sanctified

89

be taken up into the grace that makes resurrection bodies holy. Because I have tried, throughout this volume, to take the goodness of material creation most seriously, the bias is in favor of the Augustinian option, but thorny questions remain. What difference, to sanctification, might material difference make? Can there be difference without disordered hierarchy? After considering some Christological paths through these questions, I turn to the hope, inherent in resurrection doctrine, that eschatological sanctification has to do with materiality. Thus, I begin with questions about the redemption of the gendered body and then expand outward to the redemption of the body more generally. The holiness of the body, which is not yet fully revealed, must already break into the community that is the body of Christ. Here I find theological resources for a constructive anthropology, resources I have been seeking since the first chapter when I introduced feminist questions about bodies and power. I find these resources in the very particular, material body of Christ.

Gender and the Body In chapter 1, I argued that feminist insights concerning the human body must not be ignored for two significant reasons. First, because women are associated with bodies, any ethics that claims to take seriously the flourishing of all human creatures, female and male, must wrestle with the cultural tendency to devalue the body. There is a real sense in which to care for the body is to care for women, just because the bodies of women have been targeted to be broken. Second, bodies are sites of power. Power acts on bodies. An ethic that seeks to differentiate between malign and benign power will have to attend to the way those powers shape bodies. What body does sinful power shape? What body does the power of God, that omnipotence revealed most fully in Christ’s death and resurrection, shape? Theological affirmation of the body already makes problematic any assumption that the Christian tradition is systematically misogynist. Because of the way feminist theory helps us understand both disordered and desirable incarnations of bodies, the concept of the ordered body given us by Augustine has offered an important perspective of judgment on our culture’s ways of producing bodies marked by gender, race, and class. Disordered bodies, under sin, take disordered shape. One of these disordered shapes takes form in ways of living the gendered body that are contrary to God’s intentions for humanity as male and female. Rightly ordered bodies, pointed toward God, will incarnate gender in a determinedly different way. Augustine’s concept of the ordered body prompts us to recognize the sinful disorder of bodies highlighted by

90

marks of his wounds

feminist critiques of the gendered body. It further prompts us to move beyond that recognition to acknowledge the need for bodies to be rightly ordered toward God. Gendered embodiment thus serves as a culturally significant illustration as I attempt to imagine what it might mean to be made holy as embodied creatures. How will God sanctify female and male bodies? In the Christian tradition, there have been two primary options: either gendered bodies are a problem to be wiped away in redemption, or they are an intrinsic part of that nature which God, in making things new, will take up into grace.

Gender Obliterated One way the material difference of gendered bodies has been dealt with is to maintain that this aspect of being human will be eradicated in the eschaton. In identifying this first way of thinking about the redemption of gendered bodies with the East, I am, admittedly, indulging in caricature. The very Western Calvin, while he does not treat the redemption of gendered bodies as such, belongs within this framework inasmuch as he understands the problem with bodies to be their sheer materiality. Any theology that—rather than pinpointing the trouble with bodies as one of (intrinsically redeemable) disorder—instead imagines materiality itself to be the source of that trouble is akin to this way of understanding gender and redemption. Understanding the materiality of gender difference as an obstacle to be removed as we are brought into the life of God is and has been a live option in the Christian East. Peter Brown tells us how Origen ‘‘conveyed, above all, a profound sense of the fluidity of the body. Basic aspects of human beings, such as sexuality, sexual differences, and the seemingly indestructible attributes of the person associated with the physical body, struck Origen as no more than provisional.’’3 Origen’s picture of redemption was one in which physicality would be so completely transformed as to become not only unrecognizable but perhaps not even continuous with the body now. Origen’s ‘‘body was poised on the edge of a transformation so enormous as to make all present notions of identity tied to sexual differences, and all social roles based upon marriage, procreation, and childbirth, seem as fragile as dust dancing in a sunbeam.’’4 Whether or not those ‘‘social roles based on marriage, procreation, and childbirth’’ are necessary to an ‘‘identity tied to sexual difference’’ is an important question to ask as we consider the redemption of gendered bodies. The assumption that the link is necessary lies at the heart of tendencies to claim gender dissolution as redemptive. If sinful social roles, largely determined by state-sponsored and state-controlled forms of family life, are the inevitable result of gendered bodies, then we understand the impulse to jettison those

the body sanctified

91

bodies when imagining redemptive hope. Perhaps, though, this particular link is not as solid as it appears to be under the condition of sin. In any case, sensing the specter of gnostic devaluation of the body, the tradition firmly rejected Origen’s dematerialized eschaton. Gregory of Nyssa assented in that rejection, abandoning Origen’s understanding of a redemption in which the redeemed body need not be materially continuous with the body in this age. Nyssa’s resurrection body is a material body. He nonetheless spiritualizes the redemption of the body when faced with the messy materiality of male and female bodies. Nyssa ‘‘had no doubt whatsoever that the present division of the sexes into male and female formed part of the present anomalous condition of human beings.’’5 Gregory taught that, before the fall, human beings were without sex, that is, without genitals, and that, at the resurrection, we may expect a return to such a state. If we read the gendered body with Gregory, it becomes part of the tradition of the ‘‘garments of skin,’’ those things added by God to humanity only after the fall, meant to ensure survival. The garments of skin are gifts of grace, to be sure, but they are nevertheless outside of both God’s creative and final intentions for humanity. Whatever hope we have for the redemption of gendered bodies, gender roles, as we know them, are deeply scarred by sin. Sarah Coakley links Judith Butler’s ‘‘denaturalization’’ of gender with the eschatological transformation pointed to by Gregory.6 Coakley takes care to help us see that this transformation is never simple escape from the gendered body, from what gender does to the Butlerian performances of our lives. Liberation from gender, worked out through a life of asceticism, gestures ‘‘to an eschatological horizon which will give mortal flesh final significance, a horizon in which this restless, fluid postmodern ‘body’ can find some sense of completion without losing its mystery, without succumbing again to ‘appropriate’ or restrictive gender roles.’’7 Coakley wants to make use of Gregory and the dissolution of gender to claim a political good, a resistance to the disorder of gender roles under sin. She nuances this gender fluidity, but there is still a danger lurking: the erasure of difference, the denial of its importance. A disconcerting shadow of flight from the messiness of physicality hangs over both Gregory and such appropriation of him. Must redemption of the sinful ways we experience gendered bodies necessarily mean that those bodies themselves are outside of God’s redemptive intention? Right interpretation of the Nyssan tradition on this question has also been taken up in the literature of the Orthodox Church. Thomas Hopko refuses the eschatological dissolution of gender with precisely the results Coakley, and others who have seen liberation in gender dissolution, fear. Hopko tries to take

92

marks of his wounds

sexuality seriously as an important aspect of being human, and he attempts to offer a theological account of how sexuality can be lived out in a way that is congruent with God’s will. But when Hopko rejects the degendered eschaton, claiming that sex and gender are proper to human nature,8 he immediately concludes that the way gender has been instantiated under sin belongs to nature and even to redemption. In an attempt to locate genuinely feminine characteristics in scripture and Church tradition (and not in sinful human desires), Hopko gives the Spirit special place. In the Spirit’s specific work of giving life to the Godhead and to creation, in the annunciation, in the Church as Christ’s body and bride, and in the nurture of the saints, Hopko finds images evoked ‘‘which may properly be called ‘feminine’ and ‘maternal.’ ’’9 In such supposedly ‘‘properly’’ feminine images, Hopko finds indication of ‘‘aspects of divine and human being and action which all divine and human persons must have, but which in the order of creation and redemption belong especially to women.’’10 But he cannot account for why this is so, apart from cultural assumptions about what women and men are like. It seems such characteristics belong especially to women only because they are indicative of the way gender has usually been instantiated. Having identified the Father and the Son with masculinity and the Spirit with femininity (despite his own fine warnings about attributing to God anything that belongs to creation), Hopko identifies man as giver. His woman becomes the ‘‘accompanying receiver’’ who ‘‘empowers man to be both human and masculine by inspiring and accepting his gift of love.’’11 Because Hopko uses the hierarchical Trinitarian theology of the East, his identification of femininity with the third person of the Trinity, itself problematic, becomes license for hierarchical ordering of embodied men and women. Man’s hierarchized headship, image of the Father as arche, makes him a man, and woman ‘‘is needed to fulfill and complete man’s very being as human.’’12 Hopko makes broad claims that can only come from simple acceptance of the disordering of bodies under sin. Man’s anxiety is supposedly ‘‘rooted in the fear that what he has to give will not be received, that he will be spurned and rejected, that he will not be good enough or do well enough. . . . Woman’s anxiety, on the other hand, appears to be rooted in the fear that she will not really be loved, but used and abused, taken advantage of and discarded.’’13 If these descriptions are true in any way, there is no sound theological reason to believe that they reflect God’s good intention. These men and women are not free to both give and receive; they are not free to be anxious about their failures as givers and receivers. Hopko’s men are to learn masculinity from Christ (in a way unavailable to women?); his women are to learn femininity

the body sanctified

93

from the Church in the Spirit (in a way unavailable to men?). He transfers this hierarchalization and separation to the eschaton: ‘‘Our gender distinction will remain an essential element in the unending life which God gives us in Christ.’’14 Other Orthodox theologians claim Nyssa against such reification of gender roles as we know them under sin. Verna Harrison argues for gender as temporary for humanity. Harrison also gives this eschatological supposition normative weight: ‘‘Fourth century ascetics sought to create a new kind of society faithful to the Gospel teachings and anticipating as closely as possible the mode of existence expected in the Lord’s coming kingdom.’’15 Harrison’s assumption is that, for the sinful ways we now embody gender to be redeemed, difference itself must be erased. Harrison characterizes the eschatological imagination of Gregory’s colleague Basil, who envisions ‘‘a genuine wholeness, a fullness of participation in divine life, in which all the virtues come to fruition.’’16 Harrison also claims that, in the Cappadocians, the language of the female becoming male is ‘‘a way of transcending culturally entrenched misogyny, not a reaffirmation of it.’’17 But here is a difficulty with the tradition of gender dissolution. It is envisioned not as a dissolution to androgyny, though this would entail its own problems, but as a resolution of all humanity into normative maleness. Teresa Shaw describes the transformation to normative maleness for late ancient female ascetics: ‘‘Descriptions of the physical changes brought on by food deprivation emphasize reduction in sexual humors through drying and cooling, drying or shriveling of the breasts, and general destruction of the female characteristics or ‘nature’ of the body.’’18 We must recoil from a vision of holiness that equates it with masculinity. This way of thinking assumes that the female body is an aberration, a problem to be solved, while it gravely underestimates the sinfulness and disorder of male bodies, as we know them. Here, we must unequivocally reject the seductive and popular misconception that hope for women lies within Gnosticism.19 Liberation bought at the price of the erasure or romanticization of women is no freedom. Salvation construed as escape from the body mocks the woman who is trying to care for small children, the woman who wants children but cannot have them, the woman who has them but has no support. The reproductive body reveals the falsehood of gnostic hope. Harrison also reads the Cappadocians as insisting that gender must be dissolved eschatologically because it is a threat both to the unity of God’s people and to their virtue. The assumptions that difference necessarily precludes unity and that female bodies necessarily invite vice are unquestioned. Might there be other ways of being different, other ways of being sexual than

94

marks of his wounds

the sinful ways we know? Might these ways embrace material difference and sexually differentiated embodiment? Not so for Harrison who, in reading the Cappadocians normatively on this point, makes gender distinction ‘‘only’’ bodily, and hopes for a ‘‘variety of moral beauty [to] displace other kinds of human division, including gender.’’20 For creatures who are psychosomatic wholes, nothing is ‘‘only’’ bodily. For creatures saved by God incarnate, the body has to matter more than this. Valarie Karras insists that, rather than an undefined identical nature for all human creatures, the image of God is ‘‘the root of ontology of all humanity, both male and female.’’21 She also critiques Hopko and asserts the tradition of gender dissolution. Karras gets to the Christological heart of the matter with the claim that ‘‘All human beings are henceforth types of the begotten Son . . . humanity, both male and female is created in the image of Christ.’’22 She names a difficulty in Hopko’s understanding of gender: it ‘‘implies that an individual human being is not wholly and fully human, does not in and of himself or herself reflect the fullness of God’s image.’’23 What is exactly right, in this concern, is the recognition that we cannot suppose that one man and one woman together ‘‘reflect the fullness’’ of the image or that a couple are somehow closer to the image than a single Christian. The claim fails to reckon though with the full meaning of the one body of Christ—it is especially dangerous for Christians to suppose that, as individuals, they might fully reflect the image. Only the ecclesial body may hope to do so.24 In Hopko’s thesis, I am confronted with a common temptation in making an argument. Because he claims sex-gender difference at the eschaton to naturalize sinful gender roles, he gives me great pause. My temptation is to leave his thesis out for fear it would simply confirm the suspicion that what I hope to do in the rest of this chapter is only a refusal to take sin seriously. Perhaps he plainly confirms the Eastern option of gender dissolution as the single ethically tenable path. Hopko proves, some might say, the danger of the road I am suggesting. This is the very reason Coakley leans toward Gregory’s degenitalized eschaton. Such omissions can be dishonest, but that is not my primary concern in including Hopko here. To omit him would obscure my argument inasmuch as he brings to the fore the very real concerns inherent in the Augustinian option to be reasserted below. It is not difficult to see the temptation to seek liberation outside of the body, especially outside the gendered body, but this fails to take the body as it is revealed to us in the doctrine of the resurrection seriously. It offers a false liberation available only to those who, through privilege and power, can escape the graced and sanctifying messiness of embodied life.

the body sanctified

95

Gender Redeemed As discussed, Augustine paints a strikingly different portrait of our embodied hope. For Augustine, materiality itself, while disordered under the condition of sin, is not a problem to be overcome. It is part of God’s grace for humanity. When Augustine considered gender and the resurrection, he asked with his culture, would the bodies of women retain their sex? Augustine takes materiality seriously. He gives his simple and radical answer; ‘‘both sexes are to rise’’ (CD 22.17.1144).25 Let us consider the passage in greater detail: For then there will be no lust, which is now the cause of confusion [that of those who suppose there will be no female bodies at the end]. . . . Vice will be taken away from those bodies, therefore, and nature preserved. And the sex of a woman is not a vice, but nature. They will then be exempt from sexual intercourse and childbearing, but the female parts will nonetheless remain in being, accommodated not to the old uses, but to a new beauty, which, so far from inciting lust, which no longer exists, will move us to praise the wisdom and clemency of God, Who both made what was not and redeemed from corruption what He made. (CD 22.17.1144–1145) Several things are happening in this passage. First, Augustine denies the fear of the Nyssan tradition that, if gendered bodies are to persist, disordered sexuality will persist as well. For Augustine, this assurance is offered primarily to men. It takes the form of ‘‘do not worry, brother, women will no longer turn your eyes from God,’’ but we might imagine such assurance offered to women both of Augustine’s time and of our own, both in this way and in another. There is comfort here for the raped virgins Augustine consoles earlier in City of God. Gendered bodies can exist without disordered and violent sexuality. Second, Augustine insists with the question of gender, as with other questions surrounding resurrection bodies, that vice will be removed but nature preserved. Sexed bodies, male and female, are for Augustine the stuff of nature, and God does not make us new by destroying nature. God saves us rather than some other creatures altogether.26 Part of who we are is written on our materially different bodies. They incarnate the histories of our lives together and our lives before God. Finally, Augustine imagines a way of being embodied in which material gender difference reflects particular beauty, beauty that orders the saints to God. Here, rather than material difference being an obstacle to the unity of the body, it displays for that body the glory of God. Because a woman’s sex is not a defect, because it is natural, sexed

96

marks of his wounds

bodies will persist (even as they are radically transformed) at the resurrection. While we must question whether we have access to what ‘‘natural’’ gender might look like were it fully subject to sanctification, the affirmation of all the goods of materiality as central to God’s redemptive plan is a necessary one. In affirming this Augustinian option, we begin with the negative, with a warning: if we are to incline this way, we must name the dangers lurking behind any assumption that we have straightforward access to redeemed bodies. Gender serves as a striking test case for this warning precisely because we have shaped such dreadfully distorted sinful caricatures of ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ and then called them God’s intention. Only with this warning in place can we turn to the positive theology of the Augustinian option. If we are to claim the goodness of materiality in this way, we will have to be willing to say something more than that we must exercise caution when making eschatological claims. Because the eschaton reaches back into our time, because we believe that the Spirit of Jesus Christ makes us holy, we have to venture something beyond such warnings. If materiality matters for the life of the fully redeemed, it matters for those on the way. What is more, God does not leave the wayfarers entirely without access to the body redeemed. If, eschatologically, there is gender, then there is some sense in which there is natural gender, but we have to access it through redemption. In the difference between Augustine’s and Gregory’s understandings of our resurrection bodies, we find impetus to explore just what it might mean for us to claim that sex or gender is, in some sense, natural. We can only consider making this claim if we recognize that the gendered ways our bodies have been ordered may, under sin, in fact be instances of disorder of the most horrific kind.27 The ordered body as understood by Augustine can offer an important perspective of judgment on our culture’s ways of producing gendered bodies. To recapitulate, I begin with the negative moment: it is dangerous business to make normative claims about bodies. I then move to the positive moment: in Jesus Christ, we have tangible access to the body redeemed.

Natural Bodies, Gracious Bodies To invoke nature and grace is to play with tremendously loaded categories, and trying to think through what these theological rubrics might tell us about gendered bodies is an ideological minefield. There is a sense in which the spirit of both Karl Barth and Judith Butler points us together to a similar

the body sanctified

97

challenge. ‘‘You say you have a body,’’ both might ask, ‘‘you think you know your body, but what are you talking about?’’ To allege knowledge of the body, to assert access to the natural, is to make normative theological and political claims. Margaret Atwood has an intuition related to the theology of nature in her dystopia, Oryx and Crake. Jimmy questions his friend Crake’s genetic production of plants that grow chicken breast and terrifying attack dogs: ‘‘What if they get out? Go on the rampage? Start breeding, then the population spirals out of control—like those big green rabbits?’’ ‘‘That would be a problem,’’ said Crake. ‘‘But they won’t get out. Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.’’ ‘‘Meaning what?’’ said Jimmy. He wasn’t paying close attention, he was worrying about the [genetically altered animals]. . . . How much is too much, how far is too far? ‘‘Those walls and bars are there for a reason,’’ said Crake. ‘‘Not to keep us out, but to keep them in. Mankind needs barriers in both cases.’’ ‘‘Them?’’ ‘‘Nature and God.’’ ‘‘I thought you didn’t believe in God,’’ said Jimmy. ‘‘I don’t believe in Nature either,’’ said Crake. ‘‘Or not with a capital N.’’28 Crake goes on to obliterate humanity by disseminating a genetically produced virus. Before this act of anthropocide, he has fashioned his own, new, humans, a people designed by him to be above the foibles he perceives in the Nature he disavows. He supposes, among other things, that he knows how to rewrite the gendered body to escape the ways it has existed as broken. To ‘‘believe in’’ Nature is somehow to confess God the Creator, but it is also to invite the dangers named by Barth and Butler—those of confusing God’s good intentions with sinful human desires. Do we have access to the eschatological gendered body? Hopko warns, ‘‘we must be careful to distinguish qualities which are authentically ‘feminine’ and ‘maternal’ from those which have been so designated by sinful people.’’29 Hopko attempts to do this on the basis of scripture and tradition, but his stereotyped descriptions of maleness and femaleness suggest that he has failed in the task of separating sinful construction from divine intention. The overarching Barthian and Butlerian warning about natural theologies has to be taken most seriously when we dare to invoke nature as normative. We need to exercise extreme caution.

98

marks of his wounds

Barth himself is a fine illustration of these claims. His Church Dogmatics constitute an articulate counsel against the pride of believing we possess access to nature. He destroys the suspicions of Ludwig Feuerbach by acknowledging them completely—yes, what we are prone to call God is only the projection of our own desires.30 Translated into the case of the natural body, what we think we know of bodies and what God created them for is, again, stained by the projection of our own sinful desires. In response to this sinful nature, Barth insists that the reality of God is known, concretely and particularly, in God’s act in which ‘‘we stand . . . in the circle of the life of the people of Israel’’ through Jesus Christ (ChD II/1.262). When Barth turns to anthropology, he is no less clear that we cannot know ourselves, our souls or our bodies, outside of Christ: ‘‘Who and what man is, is no less specifically and emphatically declared by the Word of God than who and what God is’’ (III/2.13). We are well advised not to claim knowledge of the natural body or of its gendered incarnations without Barth’s warning that ‘‘what we recognize to be human nature is nothing other than the disgrace which covers his nature’’ (III/2.27). Again, we ‘‘must be on our guard against any desire to illuminate the darkness in which the true nature of man is shrouded by taking into account what we suppose we know about man in general and as such from other sources. . . . If we ask concerning his true nature, we must never lose sight for a moment of his degeneracy’’ (III/2.29).31 Even Barth, however, does not refuse us a way into nature. The Word that denies us ‘‘any capacity of our own to recognize our human nature as such . . . is the same Word of God which enables us to know it’’ (III/2.40). Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word, grants us access to our own nature, by extension, to our own bodies: The nature of the man Jesus alone is the key to the problem of human nature. This man is man. . . . If we were referred to a picture of human nature attained or attainable in any other way, we should always have to face the question whether what we think we see and know concerning it is not a delusion, because with our sinful eyes we cannot detect even the corruption of our nature, let alone its intrinsic character, and are therefore condemned to an unceasing confusion of the natural with the unnatural, and vice versa. (III/2.43)32 By Barth’s own logic, we only have full access to our own natural bodies through the body of Jesus Christ. ‘‘Our human nature,’’ Barth brilliantly summarizes, ‘‘rests upon his grace’’ (III/2.50). Human creatures find, in Jesus, our ‘‘true and absolute Counterpart’’ (III/2.135). There is a way to gain

the body sanctified

99

access to God’s intentions for the body; there is a way to venture a positive shape for redeemed male and female bodies. The reality is that Barth, in this case, failed to take his own warnings about natural theology seriously.33 Barth develops his understanding of the nature of gendered humanity around the claim that human creatures are truly ‘‘fellow-human.’’ Human creatures are human only ‘‘in the encounter of I and Thou’’ (III/2.285). Binary gender is made central to human-being-in-relationship (III/2.286).34 What is more, Barth attributes a normative ordering to male-female differentiation. The man is strong, the woman weak; the man prior, the woman subsequent. Barth seems to forget that he has claimed Jesus as the true counterpart of humanity and insists that we are human only in the male-female encounter. Barth writes as though he can know male and female bodies outside of the body of Jesus Christ. He forgets his warning that, while anthropology can only be written through Christology, anthropology is not Christology. Barth’s Jesus is the man for others; humans can only hope to be with others. How, then, can Barth suppose that male and female could exist properly for each other? How can they serve as counterpart to one another outside of their proper counterpart in Jesus Christ? Rather than approaching male and female bodies through the body of Jesus of Nazareth, Barth assumes he knows what they mean, what they are for. He does not take his own careful theology of nature seriously when he turns to the gendered body.35 Then, in light of Barth’s promise and failure, what are we to do with the natural body? If we want to know the natural body, to touch it, to learn its norms, we will have to approach it through the body of Jesus Christ. I have already noted that, in postmodernity, the word ‘‘body’’ begins to lose any clear referent. I have also suggested that there is a certain way in which this is a fortunate situation. It draws our attention to the brokenness of the body as we have thought we have known it. If we want to know what a body is, we will have to turn first to the body of Jesus Christ. We cannot begin with an apparent natural referent for the term, what we in the modern West have come to understand as unproblematically bounded, individual containers of biological self, and then turn to theological understandings of the body. Our access to the body has to begin from the other direction. We begin with the body of Jesus Christ, assuming that it is really a body in the several senses in which we know it. If we want to use the word ‘‘body’’ to apply to ourselves, we will have to use it analogically.36 The proper referent for ‘‘body’’ is Jesus Christ. The body of the historical Jew from Nazareth, born of the virgin, crucified and buried, is a natural body. The body of that same one, raised by the Father in the Spirit, materially continuous with and ma-

100

marks of his wounds

terially transformed beyond the body that was crucified, is a natural body. The Church—body and bride of this same crucified and risen one—composed of men’s bodies and women’s bodies, is a natural body. The body offered on the table of that Church, broken and consumed, is a natural body. These sentences describe the body of Jesus Christ as he has granted us access, availability, to it, and these sentences must then be the starting point for our understanding of the nature of bodies. We do not begin with our bodies as we think we know them—in the bed, in the chair, at the table, in the grave—and then proclaim that the ecclesial body, the Eucharistic body, the resurrected body must only be bodies metaphorically as they do not correspond to the way we usually understand our own bodies. God’s revelation to humanity is given to the senses, given in the body of Christ. So, we begin instead with the access the Spirit has granted us to the body of the Son and accept that here we encounter the natural body. Only then can we invoke nature with proper care. Having set up a warning against loose use of nature as a concept, we can then appeal to the nature of our own bodies, as we know it through the risen body of Jesus who is the paradigm of our own redemption. Our bodies, by nature, are waiting for God’s gracious redemption; the work of the Creator is to redeem, not destroy, the good creation. Our embodied, even gendered, lives are part of that redemption. Calvin allowed for us to see nature rightly in grace. For Calvin, once our eyes are redeemed, we can see the Creator in creation. Grace reveals both fallen and redeemed nature. In the case of the gendered body, it lets us see its disorder and its possibility. Thinking theologically through Judith Butler, Serene Jones puts it this way: ‘‘We begin to see that the usual way of doing things is itself a series of performances—performances that, in sin, we have raised to the status of essential truths. God challenges the ‘as usual’ quality of the roles we had formerly played in our brokenness—the ‘as usual’ performances of the old gender binaries of sexual difference.’’37 Only through grace can we hope to avoid, as Barth did not, simply pouring the containers ‘‘male’’ and ‘‘female’’ full of all the worst cultural stereotypes. Only through grace can we hope to avoiding constructing the gendered body as a reflection of a culture that is productive of broken female bodies, distorted male bodies, bodies that are images of violence and disordered desire. We must have these cautions in place but, because we believe in a God who sanctifies, we also have real access to the redemption of our understanding of sex and gender even as we ourselves, including our bodies, are redeemed. Material contact with the body of Christ, in all its multiple yet materially bodily meanings, is the moment where we can claim this entry.

the body sanctified

101

Redemption through Material Difference If we claim such access to God’s intentions for materially different bodies, what can material difference possibly mean for our redemption? We have repeatedly encountered the fear that difference entails violence by necessity. This fear seems confirmed when we learn that Tertullian, for example, explicitly suggested that we must keep the marks of our particularity at the resurrection in order that differences of rank might be maintained.38 In the case of the gendered body, the objection is that where there is male and female, one will wrongly dominate and manipulate the other. But difference does not, of necessity, entail violence. My description of human psychosomatic unity as analogous to the hypostatic union, for example, depends on a very different account of difference. I have pushed an Alexandrian understanding of the communicatio idiomatum, and such an understanding allows us to understand the one subject, Christ the Lord, as a true unity. Analogously, it also helps us understand psychosomatic human beings as real unities. But the tradition has emphatically refused those extremes in Alexandrian Christology that suggest, for example, that the divine nature of Jesus Christ somehow swallows up or obliterates his humanity. The refusal of the Monophysite option is an insistence on and affirmation of difference without violence. Two different things are not, so the Chalcedonian definition insists, mixed or separated. They are truly united, but they do not destroy one another. The Church’s rejection of Monophysitism helps us rethink the theoretical necessary violence of all difference. We can understand our final salvation, our resurrection bodies, as somehow continuous with the difference of nature. In making us new, God does not destroy what we are. He, after all, ‘‘is our peace’’ (Ephesians 2:14). Furthermore, difference is integral to any meaningful invocation of peace. Without difference, the concept of peace is vacant. If difference were to be wiped away, our hope for the eschaton would no longer be that God’s peace will be manifest in its fullness. Peace between the nations presupposes difference. It is precisely the one-time possibility of war that makes this peace matter. Peace in the Church body presupposes that the different parts of the body have come, precisely in their difference, to be ordered together to Christ: ‘‘If all were a single member, where would the body be?’’ (1 Corinthians 12:19). As with the parts of a body, that difference without which peace would be empty certainly does not exclude unity. Above is a quote from Ephesians 2:14; the verse continues: ‘‘For he is our peace. . . . In his flesh he has made both

102

marks of his wounds

groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility, between us.’’ When Israel and the Gentile world collide, Christ reconciles bodily differences in His body (Ephesians 2:16). In his flesh, creaturely difference is both one and many. The body of Christ, as Paul writes of it, is the consummate illustration of difference in unity: ‘‘For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ’’ (1 Corinthians 12:12). This unity cannot be one in which difference is annihilated. The peace of God is that in which those who appear, in the dim light of fallen nature, utterly unable to do anything but destroy one another are seen differently in the new dawn of redeemed nature. Those who seemed, naturally, to be at war come, instead, to point to the power and peace of God. The wonder of that peace in which ‘‘the wolf shall live with the lamb’’ and ‘‘the leopard shall lie down with the kid’’ (Isaiah 11:6) is that both wolf and lamb are preserved. They are preserved even as they are made new. Where the kid sleeps peacefully in the shadow of the leopard, the kid is still a kid, the leopard still a leopard. In order for peace to matter, it must come of reconciliation, and there is no reconciliation where there is no difference. Worse, peace without difference is not peace but violence. It is a false peace that, rather than deal with the messiness of the body, destroys it. If we found that the wolf had been slaughtered to make room for the lamb to graze, we would find not peace but war. If God is to redeem us and not annihilate us, difference will be integral to our redemption. So, the peace in which the embodied saints are ordered completely to God and point one another to God is one in which difference persists among the human creatures as psychosomatic unities. The psychosomatic differences that mark the members of Christ’s body are the condition of the members’ care for one another. Those psychosomatic differences are, at least partially, constitutive of our identities. The ‘‘members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable’’ (1 Corinthians 12:22) in part because the body, in order to become holy, needs to be trained to care for the weak. Difference is also a condition of intimacy. Eugene Rogers accounts for difference by first referring it to the life of God in which the three persons of the Trinity are not one another: ‘‘Because the three persons are distinct from one another, God can ‘be’ love.’’39 Difference between creatures is not the same as difference in the Godhead, but sanctified creaturely difference is still an image of this condition of loving. Because humans are psychosomatic creatures, embodied difference is necessary for us to love another. The seemingly weaker members of the body also overturn those very hierarchies of rank that Tertullian hoped would be maintained eschatologically. We must imagine that redeemed differences of rank will well look utterly

the body sanctified

103

different from the disordered differences (like our enactments of those based on gender, class, and race) that we sinfully perpetuate in our embodied lives together now.40 Augustine imagined peace as right order, and it is the Prince of Peace and not some other Lord, after all, who proclaims the first shall be last (Matthew 20:16). To embodied human creatures, God grants a diversity of gifts (1 Corinthians 12:4–11, 27–31). It is possible that God loves us differently in our psychosomatic difference. It is possible, for example, that God loves broken bodies in a special way.41 We, too, may learn to love in peace, and so be made holy, only because of that diversity. It would be a catastrophic misstep to reify the difference of gendered bodies, to make it, among the differences which are one of the conditions of human sanctification, the primal difference as Barth did. The diversity of gifts named by Paul—utterance of wisdom, faith, healing, miracles, prophecy, discernment, speaking and interpreting tongues—have all been recognized by the Church to stretch across gender difference. It would also be a mistake, though, to suppose that embodied aspects of creaturely difference do not matter in God’s peace. And gender is surely one of the most salient of embodied differences as we experience them. So, we might imagine a way for the gendered body to be redeemed without the erasure of difference. Where bodies have been organized for disordered purposes: for violence, for reproduction meant to serve the state,42 for slavery, God can reorder those bodies. We can only imagine and live into such a reordering under the guidance of the Spirit, offered to us in the materiality of Word and sacrament and the communal discernment of the material body of Christ. We might imagine that the gender bending of sanctification, both now and at the eschaton, can only be toward the care of the body. Living the gendered body, when ordered toward God, might be especially about care of the bodies of the vulnerable. If this looks less like masculinity, as we have often known it, and more like that traditionally despised bodily femininity, we should not be surprised. God uses the weak things of the world to shame the strong (1 Corinthians 1:27). To hope, as in the Eastern option, for the dissolution of gender is to bend life away from the body. It is a kind of gnostic escape from diapers, dishes, and the dying. It is an escape from those aspects of psychosomatic life together that train us to care for the weak and broken. Our material particularity shapes our final happiness in God. Robert Jenson is exactly right when he says that the ‘‘vision of God will not be a vision from no perspective, or unaffected by the particular history I am, or by my location in the network of the saints’ mutual availability.’’43 For embodied difference to persist, it need not threaten the unity and virtue of the body of Christ. Rather, it is a central condition of that unity and virtue.

104

marks of his wounds

To Be Embodied Therefore, both now and at the eschaton, the salvation of psychosomatic human creatures will be distinctive because it includes the materially particular body. A first feature of embodiment we have explored in some detail: to be embodied is to be a part of God’s good work from creation to redemption. God will not abandon that work, and so it will be redeemed. To be embodied is also to be available to others, and this feature of our embodiment will help us understand the embodied character of redemption. Jenson puts it like this: ‘‘The personal body, as the person’s availability to others and therefore to him or herself, is just so constituted first in these modes of presence that resist dissolution into subjectivity.’’44 The availability of the body is material, tangible, and solid. The availability of the body is the material constancy of the self. I know that it is my loved one and not some other who has come through the door by her body. Rogers also takes up the language of the body as availability: As the Church and the eucharist are both the body of Christ because they locate places where Christ is physically accessible, so the body is the locus or reflex whereby human beings are accessible and vulnerable to others as God has become accessible and vulnerable to them. Love of neighbor is embodied because the body locates the accessibility of the other.45 Our bodies, as availability, are self-disclosive. Sometimes they disclose that which we would like to hide. As touchable, seeable, hearable, sensible entities, bodies are available to other such sensible entities, and this is how they love one another. Alexander Schmemann celebrates the body as availability and draws from it explanation for the doctrine of the general resurrection: In essence, my body is my relationship to the world, to others, it is my life as communion and as mutual relationship. . . . The body is not the darkness of the soul, but rather the body is its freedom, for the body is the soul as love, the soul as communion, the soul as life, the soul as movement. And this is why, when the soul loses the body, when it is separated from the body, it loses life.46 Under the condition of sin, though, to be embodied is also to be separated from others. It is the sometimes-frustrating condition of my unavailability. Often, disordered sexuality is nothing more than a desperate straining against this unavailability. This separation is a source of sadness, loneliness, and

the body sanctified

105

isolation. It is also a source of protection because of the ways in which disordered creatures harm one another. Finally, it is a gracious reminder of finitude. To be embodied is to exist in difference and unity from one another. The body’s availability is also its vulnerability, and this has a positive and a negative side. Bodies can be broken. The availability of the body opens the creature up to the sinful availability of others. It also opens her to life in community, to loving relationship, and to participation in the body of Christ. Life through the available body enables our redemption.

Sanctification and Witness Those strands in the Christian tradition that have insisted most strongly on the reality of sanctification in the Christian life have not always explicitly understood the body as witness to the Spirit who sanctifies.47 Nonetheless, the best of those traditions has always recognized holiness to be about the body as well as the soul.48 Salvation is never rightly considered as mere forensic forgiveness. Rather, it always involves our transformation.49 Since we are psychosomatic wholes, that transformation must be understood as embodied. The whole of the human creature is made new when, in John Wesley’s words, she is ‘‘really changed . . . not only accounted, but actually made, righteous.’’50 I will name four ways, each dependent on the material availability that is the body, in which sanctified bodies display God’s holiness: 1. Embodied creatures are made holy through asceticism, broadly conceived. 2. Embodied creatures are made holy through the fruit of the Spirit, grown through the embodied practice of the Church. 3. Embodied creatures are made holy through intimate care and passion for one another in their life together. 4. Embodied creatures are made holy inasmuch as they are material witnesses of God’s power and love. All of these points are indicative of the way salvation relates to psychosomatic unity, the way redemption includes the body. We begin, then, with ascetic practice as a way in which God makes human creatures, as psychosomatic wholes, new. Asceticism must not be understood as a dismissal of the body. It is precisely about taking the body seriously. Ascetic practice grows out of an understanding of psychosomatic unity. What I do with my body will affect my soul. Askesis is bodily exercise that leads to holiness. It connotes the discipline of athletic training, the grooming of the body

106

marks of his wounds

in pursuit of a good. In this respect, ascetic practice is directed toward the right ordering of whole human beings, body and soul, toward God. It is never to be confused with that severity toward the body that is not properly asceticism at all but Gnosticism.51 Asceticism is most regularly associated with two aspects of bodily life: eating and sexuality. By the practice of temperance (as opposed to gluttony), the human relationship with food is ordered to God. Teresa Shaw, in her representation of the tradition of ascetic practice, describes the psychosomatic effects of fasting: Through ascetic renunciation and discipline, not only is the soul protected and made ready to receive divine light, but the body itself is changed. Thus Gregory of Nyssa reports that his sister Macrina’s stomach was ‘‘just as we suppose [it will be] in the resurrection, free from its own desires.’’ Likewise, she had attained such a state of holiness in her angelic life that when she died her body glowed.52 Macrina’s radiant body, liberated of any desire not ordered toward God, is imagined as a token of her resurrection body. As eating is turned to something besides individual desire, the ordered rhythms of fast and feast direct the body to God. The same is true with the ordering of sexuality through ascetic practice. Chastity, whether for married or celibate bodies, directs those bodies to God. Though sexual asceticism is usually associated with renunciation like that undertaken by Augustine, we can imagine it to include much more. Eugene Rogers gives us a picture of marriage as ascetic practice. In his description, marriage becomes a way of training the body to be directed toward God. Rogers describes marriage as sharing ‘‘with celibacy the end of sanctifying the whole person through the body, of permitting the body something more to be about, something further to mean, something better to desire, until finally it gets taken up into the life in which God loves God.’’53 In his conception of marriage as askesis, Rogers helps us see ways in which the ascetic training of the body may be conceived more broadly than only renunciation of food or sexual intimacy—though these renunciations certainly have their right place in training our bodies to holiness. Such ascetic practice reclaims the life of the body from warped ways of disciplining the body. To use the example of the gendered body, eating and sexuality are certainly areas of psychosomatic life that are subject to sinful disciplines specifically directed at female bodies. Disordered eating and disordered sexuality, as they destroy the bodies of women, require an alternative order. Ascetic practice, as a means of directing the whole person toward God through

the body sanctified

107

the body, is a witness against punishing undereating and body-destroying overeating alike. Ascetic practice is a witness against violent sexualities and misdirected promiscuities, against taking the body by force or offering the body in ill-advised hope of acceptance or affection. Christian disciplines of fast and feast, of married and celibate chastity, offer a way of constructing the gendered body as reordered toward God. All of the daily, embodied, acts of our lives may become ascetic when aimed at directing us to God through the life of the body. Next, we turn to the way the embodied practices of the Church, realized in the fruit of the Spirit, are integral to our redemption in body and soul. Through the training of embodied ecclesial practice, the Spirit works fruit in us as psychosomatic wholes. Our failure to imagine ascetic practice moving beyond the realms of fasting and chastity is integrally related to our failure to realize the corporate nature of the body of Christ. We have failed to recognize, with Stanley Hauerwas, that ‘‘Holiness is not, for Paul, a matter of individual will. Holiness is the result of our being made part of a body that makes it impossible for us to be anything other than disciples. This is why the ‘little things’ matter.’’54 It is in being incorporated into Christ that we are made holy, body and soul. Through the practices of the Church body, then, we ‘‘have our bodies repositioned so that we have no other choice but to be what we were created to be.’’55 A singular, holy, way of life can be possible for that people only because they are materially engrafted into the body of Christ. This is part of what is meant by salvation by grace. The Orthodox theologian, Panayiotis Nellas, captures this reality perfectly: ‘‘Christ is not a simple Liberator. . . . More radically, He creates a new place for [humanity] in which to live. And this place is His body.’’56 Even a limited discussion of the practices of that Church, Christ’s body, which transform us, body and soul, is well beyond the scope of this argument.57 I can only note in passing a few of these. As just discussed, one is in ascetic practice. Another is works of mercy, a clear way in which ascetic practice needs to be imagined more corporately. Any kind of ascetic practice is only made possible, though, through the sacramental life of the Church that materially allows us to dwell in the body of Christ. Through baptism, communion, and other practices variously called sacrament or sacramental, we are truly bound to the only body that is properly called ‘‘holy.’’ This transformed body, ordered materially by grace, has implications for myriad Christian practices. The bodily practices of baptism and Eucharist constitutively shape other embodied acts in our lives: among these we might recognize the renunciation of violence, the care of the poor, the way we eat, the way we have (or do not have) sex, the way we live out gendered lives, and the way we die.

108

marks of his wounds

We expect that the whole of bodily life, all of its ‘‘functions,’’ again from Nellas, ‘‘are taken up by the Church, and after being sanctified they operate correctly. . . . Christ, dwelling within man, unites the various psychosomatic senses and functions of man with the senses and functions of His own body, and thus the former become senses and functions of the risen body of Christ, that is to say, spiritual and immortal.’’58 We are reordered through the body of Christ when we participate in the ecclesial life of that body. We are reordered through the practices of, to name a few, hearing and doing the Word, receiving communion, communal support and admonishment, communal acts of charity and mercy, corporate worship, prayer, and praise. The Spirit works fruit in us (Galatians 5:22–23) through the life of the body. Love must have a body. Joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control all must have a body. Without the body, such fruits are not only empty concepts; they are not available to the other members of the body of Christ. Perhaps the mutual availability of the embodied gifts of the Spirit is what Augustine hoped for when he pictured the resurrection body: ‘‘How wonderful will the body’s condition be, when it will be in every way subject to the spirit’’ (CD 22.24.1165). In the availability of Spirit ordered bodies to one another, we move to the third indication of how redemption implicates the body. We love one another through the passions—we are moved to the good by the sensibility of the body.59 When we misconstrue the good, the passions are part of the body’s disorder. Rightly, however, desire itself is to and for God. One way we are graciously permitted to seek Christ is through the love, desire, and joy we have for one another. Thus our passionate love for each other, not only that love narrowly conceived as sexual, is an aspect of our sanctification out of the reach of the disembodied soul. Ordered desire rightly directs us to the love of God. Our sensible delight in one another rightly orders us to the Creator. Rogers reminds us that ‘‘it is through the body that the neighbor, and through the neighbor Christ, by the Spirit, does not leave human beings alone.’’60 We know and love God through the available bodies of other human creatures. So, we need to be available to one another very much. It is in Christian community that we are shaped into lovers of God and neighbor, ‘‘for knowledge begins from creatures, tends to God, and love begins with God as the last end, and passes on to creatures.’’61 We are shaped in our love through the ecclesial body. The desires of psychosomatic creatures are ordered only through their bodies. With the Psalmist, our flesh faints for God. Desire is taken up for and ordered to God, and our bodies long, finally, for our Redeemer. We come to the last way in which the body is implicated in sanctification. In our love for each other, we are opened up to the body as witness. It is true that

the body sanctified

109

the body may witness to many things that are not of God. Here again, the example of the gendered body is useful. Susan Bordo reminds us that femininity, inscribed on the bodies of women, may witness to horribly disordered ways of living the gendered body: In hysteria, agoraphobia, and anorexia, then, the woman’s body may be viewed as a surface on which conventional constructions of femininity are exposed starkly to view, through their inscription in extreme or hyperliteral form. They are written, of course, in languages of horrible suffering. It is as though these bodies are speaking to us of the pathology and violence that lurks just around the corner, waiting at the horizon of ‘‘normal’’ femininity.62 It is most pointedly in the context of such counter-witnesses that bodies witnessing to holiness, to right order, and to peace become most significant and striking. What kind of body witnesses against the culture that produces, among other broken bodies, bodies marked by versions of femininity that kill? One clear answer is displayed in the martyr’s body. This body is offered, not to twisted constructs of gender, race, class, or national pride, but in faithful witness to the one who breaks down such constructs and exposes them for what they are. In a situation where martyrdom was a real possibility, Athanasius celebrated that, because death was already overcome in Christ, Christians could train their bodies for such witness without fear. ‘‘All the disciples of Christ despise death,’’ wrote Athanasius; ‘‘they take the offensive against it and, instead of fearing it, by the sign of the cross and by faith in Christ trample on it as on something dead. . . . Even children hasten thus to die [a martyr’s death], and not men only, but women train themselves by bodily discipline to meet it.’’63 The bodies of the martyrs witness to the victory over death brought about decisively in Christ’s resurrection. Their very flesh displays the work of Christ for them. The Anabaptist Martyr’s Mirror, meant to encourage other Christians, describes the death of Eulalia who is said to have studied the ‘‘gashes on her body’’ and then cried out, ‘‘Behold, Lord Jesus Christ! Thy name is being written on my body; what great delight it affords me to read these letters, because they are signs of Thy victory! Behold, my purple blood confesses Thy holy name.’’64 In the martyrdom of Blandina, those who watched ‘‘saw with their outward eyes in the person of their sister, the One who was crucified for them.’’65 Here we have an account in which, precisely at the point of embodying the politics of peace written on Christ’s hands and feet, one of his saints assumes his bodily form. Eulalia’s declaration and the insight of those

110

marks of his wounds

who saw Blandina put to death point to a crucial insight. It is in Christoformity that we become holy. It is in Christoformity that our bodies become witnesses of orderedness to God. Such conformity to Christ is not written only on martyred bodies. When Bonaventure chronicles the life of St. Francis, he describes the gift of stigmata. Francis ‘‘was to be totally transformed into the likeness of Christ crucified, not by the martyrdom of his flesh, but by the fire of his love consummating his soul. As the vision disappeared, it left in his heart a marvelous ardor and imprinted on his body markings that were no less marvelous. Immediately the marks of nails began to appear.’’66 In Francis’s bodily life, the holiness of his acts of charity and his desire for God were made visible in his flesh. Integral to the promise of eschatology is that God will call all things by their right names, will reveal them as they truly are. The gashed Eulalia, the wounded Blandina, and the stigmatized Francis are revealed not as disfigured but as holy. We remember Augustine’s transformation of deformity. To designate a body as ‘‘disfigured,’’ ‘‘deformed,’’ or ‘‘imperfect’’ is to make an extremely relative judgment. We cannot know deformation or beauty outside of redemption. Only God can name our bodies rightly, and Augustine hoped that, at the resurrection, the ‘‘beauty of virtue’’ would shine from our bodies (CD 22.19.1149). Beauty and brokenness are redefined in the Body of Christ, and the sanctified body gives witness to the head who was broken for it. A psychosomatic eschatological imagination pushes us to enact ways of being embodied in which we have the courage to surrender the body’s availability as vulnerability and to let God replace it, through grace, with the body’s availability as witness. We can be freed in grace to risk vulnerability because God has already conquered the sin and death that break the body. In Augustine’s resurrection body, opacity yields to transparency, and material availability becomes perfect because vulnerability is erased (CD 22.30.1178). Instead, the body is a sign of God’s victory over sin and death. Peace is the blessedness of the holy city, and peace is the condition that finally makes the complete vulnerability of witness tenable. Peace and holiness and order join together in the bodies of the faithful to enact praise.

The Particular Christ In Christian theology, then, we find the resources needed for constructive anthropology that were lacking in feminist theory. We find a way of understanding the psychosomatic human being as intended for God. We remember Elizabeth Grosz’s concern, identified in chapter 1, to ‘‘refuse singular models,

the body sanctified

111

models which are based on one type of body as the norm by which all others are judged.’’67 We see the sense in which Grosz is precisely right. Disordered and violent ‘‘singular models’’ have certainly shown their power to function mightily against the political and ethical goods inherent to feminist and all proper theology. Where the ‘‘singular model’’ of the white, male body dominates, bodies that do not fit that model are deemed inferior and are broken in various ways. Where twisted ‘‘singular models’’ for beautiful female bodies reign, other bodies are tormented into submitting to those models or are simply despised. There is much truth in Grosz’s caution here. Still, because of the reality of sin, the solution of simply embracing all bodies as healthy and desirable is a misguided nonsolution. If we are to venture any normative political vision, normative bodies will emerge, and, in the realm of Christian theology, one body will have to norm other bodies, the crucified and risen body of Christ. How can I claim that it is in the body of Christ, a particular and male body, that we see the shape of sanctification?68 While the redemption of persons as embodied souls entails the perseverance of material difference, it also means incorporation into that irreducibly particular body in which our many different bodies find their meaning. This Christoformity is integrally related to cruciformity. Christ’s wounds are the specificity, are the concreteness, are the particularity of this Lord. They give concrete shape to obedience, to love, to the refusal of violence, and to God’s victory over death. If we want to know the shape of a holy life, we look to that wounded body. Saint Francis, gifted with the stigmata, is an emblem of the way God makes us holy. Eulalia’s body, on which she claimed Christ wrote his name, is an ensign of the material redemption of creation. Those who watched the martyrdom of Blandina witnessed holiness in the body. It was the crucified savior whom Blandina’s onlookers saw—Christ’s wounds, not His maleness, specifically written on a woman’s body. That is, the Christoform body is cruciform, not male-form. When Calvin critiqued any overtly physical understanding of the image of God, he stated, ‘‘I should like to know . . . how in the flesh that he took upon himself Christ resembles the Holy Spirit, and by what marks or lineaments he expresses his likeness’’ (Institutes, 1.15.3). The saints point to the marks of their faithfulness in reply. The Church, itself the body of Christ, includes the bodies of both women and men as they are incorporated into Christ, even while the irreducible maleness and Jewishness of this Lord mysteriously make way for our own irreducibilities. The rightly ordered body finds its direction and telos in this specific Lord. As God makes us, embodied souls, holy, holiness can only refer to the body of Christ. Initiated at baptism and nourished at the supper, our

112

marks of his wounds

bodies now bear an ontological relationship to the risen body of Christ as it begins to make us holy. Christ’s body gives us access to Him. Theological insistence on this is necessary in the face of the body of death and in the face of the deconstruction of the body. What then, becomes of Calvin’s righteous apophaticism surrounding the material, of his well-founded fear that human beings are simply producers of idols? The answer is in Calvin himself. He imagined the possibility that our vision might be redeemed, that the senses could be remade. This insight has only to be disciplined by the insistence that, for human creatures, all such redemptions are psychosomatic. Redeemed vision cannot be spiritual only. In claiming the resurrection body as the norm of our bodies now, we, in the spirit of Calvin, will have to make a crucial distinction between idol and icon.69 Images do not have to be false if the senses are holy, if those images are governed by the restrictive canons revealed in the image of the crucified and risen body of Christ. Our bodies ought, then, themselves become icons. The body ought to become a true mirror of God, a witness to what has been done in Christ. With eyes redeemed, we will be able to see each other rightly as icons of the creator. Calvin’s apophatic moment is necessary, especially in the face of sinfully disordered bodies, which claim to be icons but are cruel idols. But we cannot end discussion there. If the material body of Christ constitutes His availability to the people, encountering that body is a profoundly cataphatic moment. Our participation in His body allows that our bodies may become iconic. Specificity cannot be dissolved. If it were, it would crumble soteriology. Attempts have been made to erase the historical and material particularity of Christ,70 but this vitiates the hope of salvation for us as materially and historically particular creatures. We are returned to the patristic maxim, ‘‘what is not assumed is not saved.’’ Humanity, then, had best hope that particularity is assumed. The assumption of particularity is accomplished in the multiplicity of the true body of Christ. He assumes human historical particularity in the incarnation and all of our diverse particularity in the ecclesia. It is not, then, as Butler suggests, that particularities like the sexed or gendered body are dissolved in performativity. Rather, in faithful performance, exemplified in Christ’s saving work, those bodies are made more concrete, more bodily. Particularity assumes its true form only in faithful performance. In the crucified and resurrected body, in the ecclesial and eucharistic body, the particularity of Jesus’ body is performed in such a way that the brokenness of our own understandings of what it means to be created as particular embodied creatures is revealed. In the performance of Good Friday and Easter, the body of Christ enacts true humanity in the only way God intends us to be human,

the body sanctified

113

in concrete embodied particularity. In the particular body of Christ, the particular bodies of all are transformed but never destroyed.

Bodies for God The doctrine of bodily resurrection is not peripheral to the Christian gospel. In fact, it is determinative of any theological attempt to rightly conceive not only human bodies as created, but also human persons as redeemed. In this final chapter, we have begun to glimpse the constructive implications of those strands in the tradition, read with both Augustine and Calvin, which push us to conceive the body as integral to our hope. The ‘‘ethics’’ of this chapter indicates that Augustine and Calvin’s claims about the resurrection body change our understanding of salvation. Because we are psychosomatic unities, we are not free to imagine redemption apart from our very particular bodies. Salvation, on the way and in glory, is embodied. In their material life together, embodied creatures are redeemed in a way impossible for the disembodied. Our embodied hope, which the Spirit grants to our embodied desire, must transform our present bodily practices. God’s momentous ‘‘yes’’ to the body, in the incarnation, both judges and destroys the corrupt ways we have thought, produced, constructed, and even broken bodies in our culture. As inheritors of a long tradition on the resurrection of the body, we have promising resources to point us to theological faithfulness in the face of cultural and ecclesial ambivalence about the body, ambivalence which feminism reminds us is inextricably linked to a misshapen politics. I have argued that our theologies of the body must account for the brokenness of the body of death. Feminist thought reminds us that this brokenness, in our sinful world, has been especially acted out on certain bodies. The Christian theological tradition offers an account of this brokenness and of hope for overcoming it. With Augustine we can claim a way of reconceiving the body as disordered and broken under sin but intended only for good, for holiness. With Calvin, we can claim the need for our bodies to be purified, made new, so we can see nature as it was intended. We can claim victory over the enemy death. The logic of the tradition points to the need to conceive ourselves as fundamental body-soul unities. What we do with our bodies affects our souls, and vice versa. So God sanctifies us. I have asked my reader to imagine the material body, individual and ecclesial, sanctified. I have suggested that bodies are intended as witness to the One who saves them from death and that the material particularity of those bodies is inseparable from that witness.

114

marks of his wounds

Our bodies now must refer to the resurrection bodies to come. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection points us to a way of conceiving our whole selves, body and soul, as ordered toward God. It points to the need to understand the signs of our created difference not as unimportant physical superfluities but as central to our theological anthropology and ethics, as inseparable from a politics that hopes to embody peace in any meaningful way. It points to the need for the hopeful ecclesial body to come together at the table around the broken body of our Lord, the food that will transform us, bringing us, body and soul, ever nearer to the creatures who will one day enjoy the vision of God. It points us to the need to understand our hope of being transformed into a holy people as a specific, physical, Christoform hope. Here, we reject desperate attempts to carve portraits of success from our own flesh. Instead, we hope that God will write on our flesh to bring us, like Francis, Eulalia, and Blandina, into ever closer approximation of the life of God. Holiness and peace have a shape, the shape of beatified wounds. The concrete body of Christ will have to be the first and final reference point for conceptualizing our own bodies and the possibility that we may be ordered toward God. Redemption happens through the body, not only through gender difference but also through the physical continuance of all the material difference and specificity that makes us who we are: of material availability, of material vulnerability, and especially of material witness. When death is finally no more, we will be shaped entirely by the love embodied in Jesus Christ. Finally, our bodies are for praise, praise of the one who is victor over death, who will shape us into witnesses to beauty, to goodness, to holiness, and to peace.

Notes

introduction 1. Harold Bloom, The American Religion: The Emergence of the PostChristian Nation (New York: Touchstone, 1992) calls Gnosticism ‘‘the American Religion proper.’’ ‘‘Peculiar as this must sound,’’ Bloom continues, ‘‘all any among us need do to begin to understand Gnosticism is to ask ourselves: What do I actually regard my innermost self as being?’’ (50). 2. All scripture references are to the text of the New Revised Standard Version. 3. One of the most important insights of contemporary feminism is to point to the ways race, gender, and class are co-implicated. The materiality of race and gender happen through one another. We cannot sever race from gender; one is always prioritized. Were limitations of space not an issue, I would certainly have dealt with these texts. On the link between gender and the construction of race, see, among others, Michelle M. Wright, Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004), Delores S. Williams, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993), and Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1988). I use gender, rather than race, as my primary illustration for another important reason. There is a crucial difference between gendered bodies and racialized bodies: both are subject to power, but race is a constructed problem, albeit one that is written onto our bodies. I argue that the gendered body relates to nature in a crucially different, though overlapping, way. 4. See Paula Cooey, Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Lisa Isherwood

116

notes to pages 5–11

and Elizabeth Stuart, Introducing Body Theology (Cleveland: Pilgrim, 1998); and Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendel, I Am My Body: A Theology of Embodiment, trans. John Bowden (New York: Continuum, 1995). 5. Isherwood and Stuart, Body Theology, 19. 6. Alexander Schmemann, Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting?, trans. Alexis Vinogradov (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 99. 7. John Donne, ‘‘Holy Sonnets, X,’’ in Poems of John Donne, vol. 1, ed. E. K. Chambers (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896), 162–163. Or, in Isaiah, ‘‘Your dead shall live, their corpses shall rise. O dwellers in the dust, awake and sing for joy! For your dew is a radiant dew, and the earth will give birth to those long dead’’ (26:19).

chapter 1 1. Immediately we are presented with a problem involving our language about bodies. To speak about ‘‘the body’’ seems to split the body from the embodied creature, and to speak about the embodied creature seems already to move us away from the concreteness of her body. I use both kinds of language, recognizing that both are problematic. When I say, ‘‘the body cries’’ or ‘‘the body suffers,’’ I mean to emphasize that other ways of speaking (for example, ‘‘I suffer’’) tend, in our deeply disembodied patterns of Western thought, to let us forget the body. 2. Schmemann, Oh Death, 77. 3. The whole history of which cannot be rehearsed here. The gist of the anti-body biases of various Platonic, Cartesian, and Gnostic philosophies is a commonplace (the body as prison, as separable from and problematic for the true self, as evil in itself, etc.). That such attitudes have, in fact, deeply affected our thinking is taken for granted in this essay. About such ways of thinking, Schmemann had this to say: ‘‘In order to console himself, man created a dream of another world where there is no death, and for that dream he forfeited this world, gave it up decidedly to death’’ (Oh Death, 36). To escape the body is, among other things, to flee the politics of this world. For a review article on the body, see Roy Porter, ‘‘History of the Body,’’ in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991). See also Donn Welton, ed., The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings (Malden, U.K.: Blackwell, 1999). 4. See Lisa Sowle Cahill’s argument in Sex, Gender, and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996): ‘‘Feminist deconstructions of moral foundations create a normative vacuum which cripples their political critique’’ (2). See also Susan Bordo, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997): ‘‘We desperately need an effective political discourse about the female body, a discourse adequate to an analysis of the insidious, and often paradoxical, pathways of modern social control’’ (92). 5. Kenneth R Dutton, The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Physical Development (London: Cassell, 1995), 13. Dutton suggests that the body is integral to cultural

notes to pages 11–13

117

meaning-making: ‘‘The pervasive ideal of the perfectible body has been for 2500 years of Western civilisation a reminder that the body is something more than itself—the mirror and form of our human aspirations, the outward and visible sign of human perfectibility’’ (9). 6. See, among the many, Kathryn Ellis and Hartley Dean, eds., Social Policy and the Body: Transitions in Corporeal Discourse, (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000); Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Dennis P. Slattery, The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of the Flesh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Thomas Walter Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990). 7. The works of Margaret Miles, Peter Brown, and Caroline Walker Bynum stand out. Miles and Brown, in particular, have been involved in the recovery of Augustine with which my reading concurs. 8. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H. M. Parshley (New York: Vintage, 1949), 167–168. 9. To nuance the position of the body in classical Christian theology, we can begin with a volume edited by Sarah Coakley, Religion and the Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). In addition, see Frank Bottomley, Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom (London: Lebus, 1979); Friedrich Christian Bauerschmidt, Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999); Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); John Paul II, The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan (Boston: Pauline Press, 1997); Aline Rousselle, Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity, trans. Felicia Pheasant (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988); and Joel James Shuman, The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine, and the Church (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999). 10. Tertullian’s affirmation of the body mocked the Valentinian gnostics. Augustine would later polemicize against the Manichean stress on ‘‘the utter bankruptcy of the body’’ (Brown, Body and Society, 198). 11. Teresa M. Shaw, The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 22. 12. Brown, Body and Society, 235. 13. Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993). In Beckwith’s reading, Christ’s body bears ‘‘social, political, and economic meanings’’ and is a site of ‘‘extreme cultural ambivalence— for his body was loved and adored, but it was also violated repeatedly’’ (5). 14. Ibid., 27. 15. Ibid., 23. 16. Brown, Body and Society, 6.

118

notes to pages 14–18

17. I am grateful to Roger Owens for helping me clarify this point. 18. Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). Bynum’s account covers the doctrine from the patristic period through the proclamation of Benedictus Deus in 1336, which declared that souls, not yet reunited with the bodies they left at death, already enjoy the vision of God. 19. ‘‘First, to Paul, the image of the seed is an image of radical transformation.’’ But Bynum acknowledges that an avowal of continuity also exists in the Corinthians text: ‘‘Something must guarantee that the subject of resurrection is ‘us’ ’’ (ibid., 6). Bynum reads the majority of later texts on resurrection bodies as explicitly turning from a Pauline focus on discontinuity to a fervent concentration on continuity. So, ‘‘concern for material and structural continuity showed remarkable persistence even where it seemed almost to require philosophical incoherence, theological equivocation, or aesthetic offensiveness. This concern responded to and was reflected in pious practices of great oddness. . . . The materialism of this eschatology expressed not body-soul dualism but rather a sense of self as psychosomatic unity’’ (11). Here, the canonical context of the Pauline text is also important. 20. Ibid., 11. 21. And yet, with what Bynum calls ‘‘the daring inconsistency of genius,’’ Tertullian and Irenaeus pair this materialist emphasis with ‘‘an emphasis on radical change that retains overtones of Paul’’ (ibid., 38). 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 136. 24. In medieval burial practice, the fragmentation that resurrection was to overcome was actively carried out on the bodies of the dead: ‘‘Bodies were divided in order to bestow their power more widely . . . they were divided because they were crucial to, and therefore distributed, self ’’ (ibid., 213). 25. Ibid., 257. Bonaventure had accounted for resurrection through the desire of soul for body, but this creates a philosophical problem, ‘‘it makes a person a partnership . . . rather than a unity’’ (256) (a sort of Nestorian anthropology?). 26. Oscar Cullmann made this question impossible to ignore for contemporary theology and biblical scholarship. See his ‘‘Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testment (The Ingersoll Lecture for 1955)’’ in Immortality and Resurrection: Death in the Western World—Two Conflicting Currents of Thought, ed. Krister Stendahl, 9–53 (New York: Macmillan, 1965). Cullmann sets up the deaths of Socrates and Jesus as indicative of irreconcilably different eschatologies. He hopes to clear up the ‘‘greatest misunderstanding’’ of Christian faith—that our hope is for immortal souls. Despite general recognition of Cullmann’s point in scholarly circles, with some exegetical qualifications, it remains true as he said, that ‘‘if we were to ask an ordinary Christian today . . . what he conceives to be the New Testament teaching concerning the fate of man after death, with few exceptions we should get the answer: ‘The immortality of the soul’ ’’ (9). 27. The word ‘‘feminism’’ is highly contested. But to be committed to a politics is to venture norms. In my work as a Christian theologian, I make certain claims and

notes to pages 18–21

119

call them ‘‘feminist.’’ I am all too aware that there are those who will disagree. At the least, then, when I say I am doing ‘‘feminist’’ theology, I mean that I will insist on taking women and their bodies into conceptual account. If certain insights of feminist theory are beneficial to a theological anthropology that accounts for the broken bodies of women, the poor, and those constructed as racially ‘‘other,’’ then those insights must be used. 28. Carolyn Allen and Judith A. Howard, eds., Provoking Feminisms (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 6. 29. Mary Midgley points out that even as the academy calls into question the concept of person as a problematic body controlled by an isolated individual will, the same concept retains and even gains explanatory power in popular culture (Midgley, ‘‘The Soul’s Successors: Philosophy and the ‘Body,’ ’’ in Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997]). Midgley rejects both physicalism and dualism. She also stresses the mind/body problem is always about gender. She reminds us that identity is always interdependent, and she decries what she labels ‘‘a Nietzschean moral fantasy’’ that we might create ourselves. Midgley dismisses the ‘‘whole idea of centering human personality on the (disembodied) will’’ as ‘‘imaginative and moral propaganda’’ (62). She calls for a reconceptualization of individual identity as both interdependent and embodied. 30. Alison M. Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983). 31. Familiar names include Mary Wollstonecraft, John Stuart Mill, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Betty Friedan. 32. Jaggar characterizes these alternatives as radical and socialist feminisms. Firstwave feminism embraced liberalism; second-wave feminism widened the questions and concerns of feminist ethics. Some now hope for a third wave. Because feminism is complex, it is always difficult to try to subdivide it into simple discrete entities (liberal, radical, etc.) These inevitably overlap, and thinkers who are supposed to fit within one category may disagree deeply. There are divergent ways of theorizing this complexity; I have already suggested that I want to point to something called feminism (a theological politics of peace) that can take normative positions. 33. Theorists include Iris Marion Young, N. Hartstock, and Sandra Harding. 34. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese (Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991]) conflates the feminisms so carefully differentiated by Jaggar. Inasmuch as they remain individualist, they remain liberal, she argues. Fox-Genovese points out that it is difficult for women to aspire to the rights of individuals when the modern individual is enabled by woman as ‘‘other.’’ She narrates the stories of many women who do not identity with ‘‘official’’ feminist narratives and calls for a family feminism that takes the needs of mothers and the need for society to care for small children into account. 35. What is at stake is highlighted in the following two quotations. First, an academic makes clear that the materiality of her body cannot be ignored: ‘‘For some of us, it is impossible to escape the body and its constructions, even inside the ‘teaching machine’. I am expected to not only carry my body, but to acknowledge it. I have a

120

notes to pages 21–24

specific and clear relationship to the knowledge that I teach, through my body’’ (Felly Nkweto Simmonds, ‘‘My Body, Myself: How Does a Black Woman Do Sociology,’’ in Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader [New York: Routledge, 1999], 52). Another feminist accentuates the way bodies are constructs of power: ‘‘There is no deep natural collectivity of women’s bodies which precedes some subsequent arrangement of them through history or biopolitics. If the body is an unsteady mark, scarred in its long decay, then the sexed body too undergoes a similar radical temporality’’ (Denise Riley, ‘‘Bodies, Identities, Feminisms,’’ in Price and Shildrick, Feminist Theory and the Body, 224). 36. The most influential constructivist theorist in the contemporary landscape is Judith Butler. See especially Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex’’ (New York: Routledge, 1993) and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990). 37. Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 1. 38. This, along with the claim that Butler is not doing anything particularly interesting or new, is the scathing critique offered by Martha Nussbaum (‘‘The Professor of Parody,’’ New Republic, February 22, 1999, 37– 45). Nussbaum worries that the early-Foucauldian analysis of power at work in Butler is simply fatalistic. 39. Though she is dependent on Butler, Grosz (Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994]) also wants to modify Butler’s position: ‘‘I am reluctant to claim that sexual difference is purely a matter of the inscription and codification of somehow uncoded, absolutely raw material. . . . This is to deny a materiality or a material specificity and determinateness to bodies. . . . It is to make them infinitely pliable, malleable. On the other hand, the opposite extreme also seems untenable’’ (190). 40. Ibid., vii. 41. Ibid., 22. 42. Margaret Shildrick and Janet Price, ‘‘Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction,’’ in Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), 2–3. 43. ‘‘Commitment to universal claims about humanity, however, is held in tension with another set of feminist theological claims on the side of constructivism. As feminist theologians well know, essentialized theological views of women’s nature and sexual difference have been used historically to diminish rather than promote the humanity of women. . . . Feminist theologians thus have good practical reason to be suspicious of essentialist and universalist positions and to use the tools of constructivism to uncover the cultural and political origins of ‘universals’ passed off as God’s truth’’ (Serene Jones, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000], 51). 44. Anne Lamott,Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 2000), 172 (my italics). 45. Schmemann, Oh Death, 30–31. 46. See Sallie McFague (The Body of God: An Ecological Theology [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993]), for whom the doctrine of the resurrection of the body becomes ‘‘the

notes to pages 24–27

121

belief that the spirit empowers the universe and all its living forms is working with us, in life and in death, to bring about the well-being and fulfillment of all the bodies in creation’’ (174). See also Lisa H. Sideris (Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection [New York: Columbia University Press, 2003]). With McFague and Sideris, I am hopeful that theology, especially the doctrine of the resurrection, might be a resource for environmentalism. But I cannot spiritualize the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, turning into a vague, and ultimately disembodied, hope. For a helpful essay critiquing feminist eschatologies, including McFague, see Valarie A. Karras, ‘‘Eschatology,’’ in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Frank Parsons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 243–260.

chapter 2 1. For an example of denial of the problems of the body’s disorder, see Kelly Brown Douglas, Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective (Maryknoll, Md.: Orbis, 1999). Lilian Calles Barger (Eve’s Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2003]) also resists the body as disordered. She goes so far as to insist that death itself must be embraced among the goods of the body. ‘‘The spirituality we embrace,’’ says Barger, ‘‘must be at peace with terms of our embodiment, our suffering, our joys, and our death’’ (106). My reading of Augustine in this chapter affirms our commonsense reaction to this proposition, that death is a cause for grief. 2. I owe my initial fascination with this reference to Caroline Walker Bynum. See her Resurrection of the Body, 97. I owe my continuing fascination with the Augustinian possibilities on freedom and sin to David Steinmetz. 3. All references to the City of God are to the English translation by R. W. Dyson, ed. (The City of God against the Pagans [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998]). They are marked both internally and in the footnotes in the following format: book. chapter.page number in the Cambridge edition. Where necessary, these are first identified by the abbreviation, CD. References to the Latin are to the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 40, Vienna, 1866–. On the topic at hand, Augustine assures his reader that the City of God ‘‘will not present a mere appearance of perpetuity by new members arising to succeed those who die. Rather, all the citizens of that city will be immortal’’ (22.1.1107). In Body and Society, Peter Brown gives us a picture of an empire in which the duty of procreation was to assure the perpetuity of the polis. Given Brown’s account, Augustine’s insistence that, in that city which is truly a commonwealth, immortality replaces the mandate to procreate has significant implications. The immortality of the resurrection body meant that the bodies of those who claimed citizenship in the City of God might be turned to other uses than producing soldiers for the state. Brown documents the manner in which many women were liberated by this concept in a way that threatened the status quo. 4. So, ‘‘As for bodies which have been consumed by wild beasts or by fire, or which have collapsed into dust and ashes, or dissolved into liquid or evaporated

122

notes to pages 27–33

into the air: God forbid that we should suppose that the omnipotence of the Creator cannot revive them all and restore them to life! God forbid that we should think that whatever is concealed from our senses in the most secret processes of nature can also escape the knowledge or elude the power of the Creator!’’ (22.20.1150). As Augustine considers the horrible questions about cannibalism often raised against the doctrine of bodily resurrection, he demonstrates his understanding that the material flesh (and he envisions various body parts coming back together at the resurrection) is essential to the identity of the individual human being, that it belongs to her in a special way: ‘‘The flesh of the man who was eaten, therefore, will be restored to him in whom it first began to be human flesh. For it must be regarded as borrowed, as it were, by the person who ate him, and, like a loan of money, it must be repaid’’ (22.20.1151). 5. CD 22.13.1141–1142. The questions and replies go on. Will resurrected infants have the body they would have had at maturity? Augustine finds no problem with answering in the affirmative; his concern is with our bodies losing any of the substance they have now, not with a gain which he sees as a good. So, ‘‘but it is not said that we shall not then receive anything we do not have now. The dead infant lacked the perfect stature of his body’’ (22.14.1142). Will all risen bodies be the size of Christ’s? Augustine assures his reader that the scriptural reference in question does not mean we will not be raised with our own very corporeal sizes (again, demonstrating his concern with material identity); rather, it must refer to the age of Christ, and thus all will be raised at about thirty years (22.15.1143), at the prime of life. Elsewhere, though, Augustine concedes even being raised very young or very old would be of no concern as long as the body enjoys health and harmony among its parts. 6. Augustine pictures the end of humanity in transformation: ‘‘The first evil came, then, when man began to be pleased with himself, as if he were his own light; for he then turned away from that Light which, if only he had been pleased with It instead, would have made the man himself a light’’ (14.13.610). Here, being fully ordered toward God results in a transformed human life—in sanctification, holiness, or deification. 7. This extraordinary passage states that ‘‘when the good of holy continence does not yield to the impurity of fleshly lusts, it sanctifies the body itself. Therefore, when such continence remains unshaken in its intention not to yield, the holiness of the body is itself not destroyed, because the will to use the body in a holy fashion persists and, as far as in it lies, so also does the power’’ (1.18.28). 8. Etienne Gilson, Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine, trans. L. E. M. Lynch (New York: Random House, 1960): ‘‘To be sure, [Augustine] always insisted on the soul’s absolute hierarchic transcendence with respect to the body, but he never admitted, in fact he rejected with abhorrence, the hypothesis of a humanity in which the body would be only a prison. . . . The body was created for its intrinsic goodness . . . the soul is united to the body in love, as an ordering and conserving force animating and moving it from within’’ (51). 9. Augustine understands this perfectly well when he is being more precise, at least in later years. He rightly reads Paul’s ‘‘spirit’’ and ‘‘flesh’’ as synecdoche for the whole person. The problems of life according to the flesh come, explicitly, not only

notes to pages 33–40

123

from the body’s faults but also from the mind: ‘‘For Scripture does not use the term ‘flesh’ to mean only the body of an earthly and mortal creature . . . a manner of speaking in which the whole is represented by the part’’ (14.2.582). For more on this topic, see Paula Fredriksen, ‘‘Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul against the Manichees and the Pelagians,’’ in Recherches Augustiniennes 23 (1988), 87–114. ‘‘For Augustine,’’ Fredriksen recognizes, ‘‘ ‘spirit’ and ‘flesh’ are primarily moral categories’’ (111). 10. Thus, ‘‘As to bodies, they are for the most part subject to wills. . . . But all of them are above all subject to the will of God, to whom all wills also are subject, since they have no power except what He has granted’’ (5.9.203). 11. Again, we see that it is, at least largely, male flesh with which Augustine must be concerned when he worries about the members of the flesh moving independently of the will. So, ‘‘it was fitting that this retribution should appear especially in that part of the body which brings about the generation of the very nature that was changed for the worse through that first and great sin’’ (14.20.620). 12. ‘‘For from the very beginning of our existence in this dying body, there is never a moment when death is not at work in us . . . mutability leads us towards death’’ (13.10.550). 13. Among many examples, ‘‘He made man a rational animal composed of soul and body’’ (5.11.206). Also, ‘‘man is not a body alone nor a soul alone, he is composed of both soul and body’’ (13.24.575). 14. God even created parts of the body that have beauty but no use; Augustine thinks of a man’s nipples and beard. This is because ‘‘when the body was created, dignity took precedence over necessity. After all, necessity is a transitory thing; whereas the time is coming when we shall enjoy each other’s beauty without any lust: an enjoyment which will specially redound to the praise of the Creator’’ (22.24.1164). 15. Confessions, 7.18.24. All references to the Confessions are to the lovely translation by Maria Boulding (New York: Vintage, 1997). 16. Also, the saints ‘‘do not desire to forget their bodies, as Plato thought . . . they look forward longingly and patiently to the resurrection of their bodies, in which they have suffered many hardships, but in which they are never to undergo such things again’’ (13.20.566). 17. This stands in contrast with later tradition; even Thomas Aquinas, well known for his integrative anthropology of humanity as psychosomatic unity, cannot admit actual eating into the kingdom (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. Charles J. O’Neil [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975], 4.83.1). 18. Colin Gunton, ed.,Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 150–151. 19. Kari Elisabeth Børresen, ‘‘Patristic ‘Feminism’: The Case of Augustine,’’ Augustinian Studies 25 (1994), 140. 20. Kari Elisabeth Børresen, Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Woman in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas (Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1968), xvii–xviii.

124

notes to pages 40–41

21. Ibid., 23. 22. For a treatment of Augustine’s statements on women and relationships with women as broadly consonant with his Roman society, see E. Ann Matter, ‘‘Christ, God and Woman in the Thought of St. Augustine,’’ in Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 164–175. I do not want to dispute that Augustine accepted, for example, that male dominance is ‘‘a consequence of the fall . . . and the very definition of women’s nature’’ (165). I do want to dispute that this is the only possible theological appropriation of Augustinian logic on the body. It is worth quoting Matter’s summary: ‘‘Did Augustine consider women to be in the image of God, the very humanity assumed by Christ? Yes and no: yes, in the ultimate, abstract theological definition; no, in the practical question of the role of actual women in his culture’’ (173). I am suggesting we move forward with the ‘‘yes.’’ 23. For examination of the issues involved in this discussion, see Elizabeth A. Clark, Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity (Lewiston: Edwin Mellon Press, 1986). Julian accused Augustine of holding a docetic and Manichean Christology because of the understanding that Christ was sinless because he was conceived by a virgin. 24. John T. Noonan Jr., Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists, enl. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 119. Noonan writes in the context of examining Augustine’s teachings on the goods of married sexuality. 25. Fredriksen, Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy, 107. 26. Ibid., 109. Fredriksen concludes, ‘‘precisely by so focusing on sexuality, and insisting that as now constituted it was the symptom of the Fall par excellence, Augustine, curiously, dignified it, making it an essential, not detachable, aspect of human existence. . . . Sex to Julian is reproductive biology; sex to Augustine is eroticism’’ (112). 27. For an overview, see Robert Crouse, ‘‘Paucis Mutatis Verbis: St. Augustine’s Platonism,’’ in Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 37–50. 28. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). Taylor’s reading is often unquestioned. Where Taylor says that order in Augustine and Plato is in the vision of reason, I have shown that Augustine’s order is in the life of the Triune God. Where Taylor says that, for Augustine and Plato, ‘‘human absorption with the sensible’’ (128) blocks the good, I have submitted the twenty-second book of the City of God. It is not the moral condition of the disembodied soul that finally matters for Augustine but the condition of the whole person as ordered toward God. For a recent criticism of Taylor’s thesis, see Michael Hanby, Augustine and Modernity (London: Routledge, 2003). 29. Phillip Cary, Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 72–73. Cary argues that Augustine invented private inner space in a manner that was decisively different from his influences in Plato, Cicero, and Plotinus. Cary’s reading depends on Augustine’s early texts, while my reading depends largely on what I have called Augustine’s ‘‘mature vision’’ of

notes to pages 41–42

125

the Christological body. Part of the reason that mature vision is so fascinating is that Augustine worked it out in opposition to his own earlier thought. For Augustine, Cary says, ‘‘Beatific vision, in short, is simply the fullness of intellectual vision’’ (54). Margaret Miles offers a different viewpoint as she explicates intellectual and corporeal vision in Augustine. While contemporary analysis of vision emphasizes ‘‘distance between the viewer and the object,’’ Augustine assumes an account of vision in which ‘‘a ray of light, energized and projected by the mind toward an object, actually touches its object, thereby connecting viewer and object. The ray theory of vision specifically insisted on the connection and essential continuity of viewer and object in the act of vision’’ (Margaret Miles, ‘‘Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De Trinitate and Confessions,’’ Journal of Religion 63 [1983], 126–127). Miles shows how ‘‘continuity of physical and spiritual vision is frequently and strongly affirmed by Augustine’’ (141). For Augustine, vision unites seer and seen just as surely as or more surely than contemplation unites knower and known. Stephen Menn, Descartes and Augustine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), argues that the ‘‘core of what Descartes took from Augustine was not any particular doctrine, but a hope and a discipline of drawing the mind away from the senses, through a special kind of contemplation of itself, to a special kind of contemplation of God’’ (x). What is misbegotten here is just that, for the old Augustine at least, contemplation of God happens through the bodily senses. 30. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 139. 31. Confessions, 7.9.13. In City of God, Porphyry is dismissed because he did not recognize that Christ is the ‘‘Principium,’’ who, ‘‘having assumed soul and flesh, purifies both the soul and flesh of those who believe in Him’’ (CD, 10.24.427). In not recognizing the patrikos nous as the mind of Christ, Porphyry despises ‘‘the body that He received from a woman, and because of the shame of the Cross’’ (10.28.434). 32. Brian Daley (‘‘A Humble Mediator: The Distinctive Elements in Saint Augustine’s Christology,’’ Word and Spirit 9 [1987], 100–117) provides a sympathetic analysis of Augustine’s overlooked Christology: ‘‘Many passages in his works show a deep, reflective understanding of what is implied in the news that God’s Word has become flesh, an understanding that anticipates with surprising fullness the main features of classical, post-Chalcedonian Christology’’ (101). Daley marks Augustine’s mediator Christ as a distinctive marker of his Christology. While this mediatorial role is modeled on Plotinian nous, especially in the middle and later works, Augustine speaks often of Christ’s humanity as the way to God. 33. For a careful exposition of Augustine on the body that affirms that Augustine came to understand persons as psychosomatic unities, see Margaret R. Miles, Augustine on the Body, American Academy of Religion Dissertation Series No. 31 (Missoula, Mont.: Scholar’s Press, 1979). For additional readings of Augustine challenging his assumed antisomaticism, see J. Patout Burns (‘‘Variations on a Dualist Theme: Augustine on the Body and the Soul,’’ in Interpreting Tradition, ed. J. Kopas [Chicago: Scholars Press, 1984]), and George Lawless (‘‘Augustine and Human Embodiment,’’ Augustiniana [1990], 167–186). Lawless shows Augustinian anthropology is of the person as composite; ‘‘it is ‘as though a sort of marriage’, quasi quoddam conjugium, existed between’’

126

notes to pages 42–44

body and soul’’ (170). Augustine’s body-soul person is an organic unity, and the happiness of that person embraces body and soul. Two further examples of Augustine read as disembodied include Gerald Watson (‘‘St. Augustine, the Platonists, and the Resurrection Body: Augustine’s Use of a Fragment from Porphyry,’’ Irish Theological Quarterly 50 [1983/84], 222–232), who claims the ‘‘paradox of Neoplatonism is particularly obvious in Augustine: he preaches flight from the body and its deceitfulness, yet he is bound to it, even after death’’ (231). See also Gareth B. Matthews (‘‘Augustine and Descartes on Minds and Bodies,’’ in The Augustinian Tradition [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999], 222–232), who argues for a proto-Cartesian Augustine in whom the mind as incorporeal substance stands as incontestable evidence of dualism. Matthews does find some puzzling counterevidence to his own thesis: ‘‘Augustine does not, however, rule out the possibility that some bodily condition must be satisfied for there to be a mind. Having read Descartes, we expect him to try to prove that I could exist, and therefore a mind could exist, even though there were no bodies. . . . He seems to take it for granted that, in this life anyway, he is a soul in a body’’ (230). 34. Literature examining Augustine on the bodily resurrection includes various appraisals of its place in his theology and his estimation of the body. Four articles by M. Alfeche call attention to Augustine’s texts on the topic (‘‘The Basis of Hope in the Resurrection of the Body According to Augustine,’’ Augustiniana 36 [1986], 240–296; ‘‘The Use of Some Verses in 1 Cor 15 in Augustine’s Theology of Resurrection,’’ Augustiniana 37 [1987], 122–186; ‘‘The Rising of the Dead in the Work of Augustine,’’ Augustiniana 39 [1989], 54–98; and ‘‘The Transformation from ‘Corpus Animale’ to ‘Corpus Spirituale’ According to Augustine,’’ Augustiniana 42 [1992], 239–310. Margaret Miles (‘‘The Revelatory Body: Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Flesh at Orvieto,’’ Arts 6, no. 1 [1994], 14–23) reflects on Augustine’s possible influence on later conceptions of the resurrection body. See also John A. Mourant, Augustine on Immortality (Villanova, Penn.: Augustinian Institute, Villanova University, 1969), who argues that Augustine’s Christian understanding of immortality entails a ‘‘radical break’’ with Platonism and Neoplatonism (3), and F. Van Fleteren, ‘‘Augustine and the Resurrection,’’ Studies in Medieval Culture 12 (1978), 9–15. 35. C. R. C. Allberry, A Manichaean Psalm-Book: Part II (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1938), 175. This psalm nicely displays the strong link between body-spirit dualism/antagonism and deeply rooted misogyny. Another psalm, expressing a similar sentiment, explicitly ties the womb to issues of politics and power: ‘‘Who gave light to the world these nine months? . . . Shall I lay waste a kingdom that I may furnish a woman’s womb?’’ (121). 36. For important background, see Samuel N. C. Lieu, Manichaeism: In the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China—A Historical Survey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985). 37. Jason David BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 38. David Hunter, ‘‘Augustinian Pessimism? A New Look at Augustine’s Teaching on Sex, Marriage, and Celibacy,’’ Augustinian Studies 25 (1994), 153–177.

notes to pages 44–50

127

39. Miles, Augustine on the Body, 66. 40. Margaret R. Miles (Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions [New York: Crossroad, 1992]), says that ‘‘the body must be painstakingly scrutinized for knowledge of the soul. Augustine’s detailed interest in the body—his own body—makes the Confessions a profoundly erotic text’’ (14). 41. Peter Brown, Augustine and Sexuality (Berkeley: Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture, Graduate Theological Union, and the University of California, 1983), 2. 42. Compare Augustine’s strong feelings with Miles’s observation that ‘‘it is not the woman, arbitrarily rejected, involuntarily losing her husband of thirteen years and the child of her body, that readers are urged to sympathize with, but Augustine’’ (Miles, Desire and Delight, 78). New sympathies are certainly called for. To be sure, for Augustine, the possibility of a marriage with this woman, the possibility of a rightly ordered relationship, was also excluded for class reasons, a topic as bound to politics as bodies are bound to politics. When I teach the Confessions, I find that students cannot forgive Augustine for leaving his mistress. 43. Brown, Augustine and Sexuality, 9. 44. This refers to the Confessions, when Augustine bemoans his education: ‘‘Woe, woe to you, you flood of human custom! Who can keep his footing against you? Will you never run dry? How long will you toss the children of Eve into a vast, terrifying sea, which even those afloat on the saving wood can scarcely cross?’’ (1.16.25).

chapter 3 1. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. and trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987 [1536]), 3.9.5. Other references to the Institutes are cited in the text. 2. The secondary literature on the topic is not nearly as vast as that for Augustine. See Thomas J. Davis, ‘‘Not ‘Hidden and Far Off ’: The Bodily Aspect of Salvation and Its Implications for Understanding the Body in Calvin’s Theology,’’ Calvin Theological Journal 29 (1994), 406– 418. See also Mary Potter Engel, John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988); Margaret Miles, ‘‘Theology, Anthropology, and the Human Body in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion,’’ Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 3 (1981), 303–323; James C. Goodloe IV, ‘‘The Body in Calvin’s Theology,’’ paper presented at the Colloquium on Calvin Studies at Davidson College and Davidson College Presbyterian Church, Davidson, N.C., Jan. 19–20, 1990; and Heinrich Quistorp, Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things, trans. Harold Knight (London: Lutterworth, 1955). 3. John Calvin, Psychopannychia, vol. 3 of Selected Works of John Calvin (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1983). For a concise outline of Calvin’s life, see David C. Steinmetz, Calvin in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 4. Calvin calls the soul ‘‘immortal,’’ but he is not simply a Platonist. Franc¸ois Wendel warns that ‘‘we must not, for all that, make Calvin an advocate of the soul’s

128

notes to pages 50–52

eternity, nor even of its purely natural immortality. . . . God drew out of nothing the substance of the soul, which is created just like every other creature. . . . Its immortality is a gift of God which he could withdraw from the soul if he wished’’ (Franc¸ois Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet [New York: Harper and Row, 1950], 174–175). The Anabaptists were certainly not the only group that Calvin might have chosen as his opponent; Martin Luther, among others, held to a version of the sleep of the soul (Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 9). 5. Calvin, Psychopannychia, 382. It is perhaps telling that, in his subtitle—Or, a refutation of the error entertained by some unskillful persons, who ignorantly imagine that in the interval between death and the judgment the soul sleeps. Together with an explanation of the condition and life of the soul after this present life—Calvin identifies the intermediate period as that between death and judgment and not, as is more usual, as that between death and resurrection. 6. Ibid., 383. 7. Ibid., 386. 8. Ibid., 405. 9. Ibid., 406. 10. Ibid., 414. 11. Ibid., 434. 12. As City of God served as focus for Augustine’s mature theology of the body, Calvin’s Institutes displays his thought at its most coherent, his thought carefully considered and revised over his years as a reformer, and his thought intended, by his own self-report, to provide a clear entry into the Christian faith. Wendel puts it in the following manner: ‘‘Whatever interest and value may attach to his other theological writings, the Institutes are the faithful summary of the ideas he expounded in them’’ (Calvin, 111). Both City of God and the Institutes contain powerful visions of reality as it is contained in Christ. Both works come from worlds under siege: Calvin’s refugee Geneva and Augustine’s crumbling empire were both, for their inhabitants, under attack. Calvin revised the Institutes in 1558 during an illness he thought would prove fatal. The aging Augustine wrote City of God as he became ever more preoccupied with death. Both works are written in the shadow of that mortality that must be dealt with if we are to understand the body rightly. Both works answer detractors who would paint a picture of reality different from those contained therein, and thus are useful to inform the constructive work of expositing a Christian theology of the reality of the body. 13. Calvin wanted his reader to study the Institutes alongside his exegetical commentaries; as Steinmetz (Calvin in Context) points out, Calvin hoped his Institutes would point the reader to a right navigation through scripture. Calvin also used his long doctrinal exposition in the Institutes to avoid doctrinal digressions when he was writing his commentaries on scripture. Wendel (Calvin) suggests that, while the Institutes began as teaching manual for all Christians, it became, more and more, a tool intended for students of theology. The later editions reflect greater systematization of Calvin’s thought, and the organization points to his ever-emerging distinctive theological emphases.

notes to pages 52–57

129

14. Calvin spent many years revising and expanding the Institutes until it was laid out in the 1559 order considered in this chapter. The 1551 French version of the Institutes includes sections on the bodily resurrection that are not included in the Latin until the version of 1559 (Wendel, Calvin, 117–118). 15. ‘‘The majority of the commentators . . . have drawn attention to the restraint and sobriety he imposed upon himself in this domain, into which he never ventured without precaution or without the support of Scriptural data’’ (Wendel, Calvin, 285). 16. Quistorp, Doctrine of the Last Things, 56. 17. Calvin interchanges cognitio and notitia, but he is always concerned with knowledge. 18. Emil Brunner and Karl Barth, Natural Theology: Comprising ‘‘Nature and Grace’’ by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘‘No!’’ by Dr. Karl Barth, trans. Peter Fraenkel (Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2002). For my own reading of Calvin on nature I am indebted to David Steinmetz’s account in his Calvin in Context and to Susan E. Schreiner’s Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin (Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1991). Schreiner emphasizes Calvin’s pro-material emphasis on God’s reclaiming of creation and Calvin’s very real attacks on those he calls ‘‘Manichees.’’ Calvin rejects any idea of creation as evil. 19. A ‘‘mass of errors’’ and ‘‘blind wickedness,’’ noetic and optic distortion together, ‘‘extinguishes those sparks which once flashed forth to show them God’s glory. Yet that seed remains which can in no wise be uprooted: that there is some sort of divinity; but this seed is so corrupted that by itself it produces only the worst fruits’’ (1.4.4). 20. ‘‘But although the Lord represents both himself and his everlasting Kingdom in the mirror of his works with very great clarity, such is our stupidity that we grow increasingly dull toward so manifest testimonies, and they flow away without profiting us’’ (1.5.11). We are warned from epistemological presumption and turned by Calvin to God’s self-revelation: ‘‘For how can the human mind measure off the measureless essence of God according to its own little measure . . . how can the mind by its own leading come to search out God’s essence when it cannot even get to its own? Let us then willingly leave the knowledge of God of himself. . . . But we shall be ‘leaving it to him’ if we conceive him to be as he reveals himself to us, without inquiring about him elsewhere than from his Word’’ (1.13.21). 21. See 1.15.2; 2.7.13; 3.6.5; 4.1.1; and 4.17.30. 22. Calvin explicitly corrects any tendency to suppose that the spiritual portion of creation is divine: ‘‘Souls, although the image of God be engraved upon them, are just as much created as angels are’’ (1.15.5). 23. Thus, ‘‘Now the very knowledge of God sufficiently proves that souls, which transcend the world, are immortal, for no transient energy could penetrate to the fountain of life. In short, the many pre-eminent gifts with which the human mind is endowed proclaim that something divine has been engraved upon it; all these are testimonies of an immortal essence’’ (1.15.2). The human mind conceives ‘‘the invisible God and the angels, something the body can by no means do. We grasp things that are right, just, and honorable, which are hidden to the bodily senses. Therefore the spirit must be the seat of intelligence’’ (1.15.2).

130

notes to pages 57–60

24. Of the philosophers on the soul, ‘‘hardly one, expect, Plato, has rightly affirmed its immortal substance. . . . Others so attach the soul’s powers and faculties to the present life that they leave nothing to it outside the body’’ (1.15.6). 25. Miles characterizes Calvin’s position as follows: ‘‘Body is, for Calvin, quite simply the habitation of the soul; it depends on the soul for life. . . . The soul does everything. But the condition of the body accurately and intimately reflects the state of the soul’’ (‘‘Theology in Calvin,’’ 310). 26. Steinmetz argues that Calvin uses the word ‘‘flesh’’ in a holistic Pauline sense such that trouble with the flesh ought ‘‘not be misinterpreted as warfare between the soul and the body, but as a conflict between the renewed and unrenewed parts of the human soul’’ (Calvin in Context, 117). Thus, Calvin’s negative ‘‘flesh,’’ like Paul’s, is never to be simply equated with a negative attitude towards the body as such. Miles concurs with Steinmetz: ‘‘Clearly, it is ‘flesh,’ and not the body which is the location of the ‘sluggishness’ which opposes the quickening Spirit of God’’ (Miles, ‘‘Theology in Calvin,’’ 314). As might be expected given the confusing nature of the texts, other interpreters disagree. For Quistorp, the ‘‘soul is for Calvin the real man’’ (Doctrine of the Last Things, 64). Quistorp also points out Calvin’s ambivalence on the body: ‘‘Almost no word is strong enough for Calvin in order to express this his disesteem, indeed contempt of the body. In his sermons he often calls it ‘charongne’—a rotting carcase . . . Yet at the same time he can speak of the body in the highest terms’’ (60). As Calvin says, ‘‘Original sin . . . seems to be a hereditary depravity and corruption of our nature, diffused into all parts of the soul, which first makes us liable to God’s wrath, then also brings forth in us those works which Scripture calls ‘works of the flesh.’ ’’ (2.1.8). If Calvin intends ‘‘flesh’’ as synecdoche for the whole person under the condition of sin, his language slips, on occasion, to an equation of flesh with bodies. 27. ‘‘Congruent with his theological project of describing the glory of God, Calvin gives a before-and-after picture of the human being; a third condition, the future resurrection of the body, although not yet experienced, completes Calvin’s anthropological discussion’’ (Miles, ‘‘Theology in Calvin,’’ 308). Still, the specter of dualism is present: ‘‘Calvin is eager to underline the distinction of body and soul’’ (310). See also Engel, Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology. 28. T. F. Torrance (Calvin’s Doctrine of Man, Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1957) comments that ‘‘imago dei refers to the workmanship of God in the universe . . . in this sense he [Calvin] has no hesitation in attributing imago even to the physical person of man inasmuch as he has been fashioned by the hands of God and in the wonders of his body bears evident tokens of God’s grace. . . . The chief seat of the divine image was in his mind and heart where it was eminent; yet there was no part of him in which scintillations of it did not shine forth’’ (38–39). Further, the imago dei ‘‘is destroyed in the sense that it has been radically perverted, or turned into its opposite, and into dishonour’’ (109). Calvin says, ‘‘For although God’s glory shines forth in the outer man, yet there is no doubt that the proper seat of his image is in the soul’’ (1.15.3). 29. Again, ‘‘the whole man is overwhelmed—as by a deluge—from head to foot, so that no part is immune from sin and all that proceeds from him is to be imputed to sin’’ (2.1.9).

notes to pages 60–63

131

30. Barbara Pitkin, ‘‘Nothing but Concupiscence: Calvin’s Understanding of Sin and the Via Augustini,’’ Calvin Theological Journal 34 (1999), 347–369. 31. Ibid., 351. 32. Barbara Pitkin, What Pure Eyes Can See (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 33. Ibid., 7. 34. ‘‘It is therefore in vain that so many burning lamps shine for us in the workmanship of the universe to show forth the glory of its Author. Although they bathe us wholly in their radiance, yet they can of themselves in no way lead us into the right path. Surely they strike some sparks, but before their fuller light shines forth these are smothered’’ (1.5.14). 35. Scripture serves as spectacles: ‘‘Just as old or bleary-eyed men and those with weak vision, if you thrust before them a most beautiful volume, even if they recognize it to be some sort of writing, yet can scarcely construe two words, but with the aid of spectacles will begin to read distinctly; so Scripture, gathering up the otherwise confused knowledge of God in our minds, having dispersed our dullness, clearly shows us the true God’’ (1.6.1). 36. All creatures become mirrors of God: ‘‘Meanwhile let us not be ashamed to take pious delight in the works of God open and manifest in this most beautiful theater. For, as I have elsewhere said, although it is not the chief evidence for faith, yet it is the first evidence in the order of nature, to be mindful that wherever we cast our eyes, all things they meet are works of God, and at the same time to ponder with pious meditation to what end God created them’’ (1.14.20). 37. For a broader account of the Reformation controversies over the use of images in relation to the meaning of the first commandment, see Steinmetz, Calvin in Context; when Calvin entered the argument, battle lines were already drawn. Steinmetz emphasizes that all agreed on the prohibition against worship of false gods but disagreed on whether this must be done best without images. 38. Ford Lewis Battles, ‘‘God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity,’’ Interpretation 31, no. 1 (1977), 19–38. God’s gracious accommodation to our needs is read as central to interpretation of scripture and, indeed, to all of Calvin’s theology. Central is God’s ‘‘supreme act of condescension, the giving of his only Son to reconcile a fallen world to himself ’’ (21). Christ’s incarnation is God’s accommodation to us par excellence. 39. Geoffrey Wainwright’s repeated references brought Charles Wesley’s Christmas hymn, ‘‘Let Earth and Heaven Combine,’’ to my attention; see his Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life—A Systematic Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 207–208. 40. ‘‘But God also designates himself by another special mark to distinguish himself more precisely from idols. For he so proclaims himself the sole God as to offer himself to be contemplated clearly in three persons. Unless we grasp these, only the bare and empty name of God flits about in our brains, to the exclusion of the true God’’ (1.13.2). 41. Gary Macy, Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper (New York: Paulist Press, 1992). Eucharistic theology ‘‘touches the heart

132

notes to pages 63–67

of the theology of the reformation, the question of how and why humans are saved’’ (136). 42. Francis Clark, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967). 43. Luther denied three elements of then-current Catholic teaching on the Eucharist as incompatible with reformation theology: (1) the reception in one kind, (2) transubstantiation as the best explanation for Christ’s presence in the sacrament, and (3) the sacrifice of the mass. For Luther, these denials never touch on the real presence of Christ’s body in the supper; his denial of the mass sacrifice has to do with his denial that the supper can be a work. Paul Althaus (The Theology of Martin Luther [Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966]) describes two stages in Luther’s teaching on the Eucharist. The first, marked by Luther’s turn from Rome, was characterized by this insistence on the gift character of the sacrament; the second by increased focus on the physical character of the eating. This second stage is given impetus by Luther’s denial that the supper can be, in any way, a work. 44. John R. Stephenson, ‘‘Martin Luther and the Eucharist,’’ Scottish Journal of Theology 36, no. 4 (1983), 447– 461. 45. Brian Gerrish (Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993]) points us to the way that Calvin has been Zwinglianized or Catholicized by various interpreters, some finding horror in one conclusion, some in the other. 46. Calvin’s insistence that baptism is for infants but the supper is not also seems important in this regard. Whatever Calvin’s supper is, it is reserved ‘‘for those capable of discerning the body and blood of the Lord, of examining their own conscience, of proclaiming the Lord’s death, and of considering its power’’ (4.16.30). Whatever Calvin’s supper is, its sheer givenness is not well-enough established to preclude the need for mental work on the part of the recipient. Calvin’s supper is ‘‘a spiritual banquet, wherein Christ attests himself to be the life-giving bread, upon which our souls feed unto true and blessed immortality’’ (4.17.1). 47. Calvin does not conceive of the supper as a physical medicine fitting our very bodies for immortality. Instead, ‘‘from the physical things set forth in the Sacrament we are led by a sort of analogy to spiritual things . . . as bread nourishes, sustains, and keeps the life of our body, so Christ’s body is the only food to invigorate and enliven our soul’’ (4.17.3). 48. Schreiner, Theater of His Glory, 3. 49. Calvin was chronically ill and in pain. In an article defending Calvin’s theology of the body, Thomas J. Davis draws our attention to Calvin’s pain. He does not dispute the general outlines of my reading of Calvin, but he claims Calvin’s constant pain made him ‘‘realistic’’ about the body, illness, decay, and death (‘‘Bodily Aspect of Salvation,’’ 408). 50. He also states, ‘‘But no one in this earthly prison of the body has sufficient strength to press on with due eagerness, and weakness so weighs down the greater number that, with wavering and limping and even creeping along the ground, they

notes to pages 67–73

133

move at a feeble rate. . . . We shall attain it only when we cast off the weakness of the body and are received into full fellowship with him’’ (3.7.5).

chapter 4 1. I develop the argument for psychosomatic unity around the assumption that human beings are bodies and souls simply because this is the anthropological assumption of Augustine and Calvin. Because my argument is grammatical and not ontological, there is no reason it cannot apply as well to those who maintain a tripartite anthropology (body/soul/spirit). Arguments over whether we ought to have a dipartite or tripartite anthropology are the sort of thing I am trying to avoid by giving attention to a grammar of unity. 2. John W. Cooper, Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the Monism-Dualism Debate (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989). 3. Ibid., 16. 4. Ibid., 46. 5. Though it may become one when, contrary to nature, it is separated from the body. See Eleanor Stump (Aquinas [Oxford: Routledge, 2003]): ‘‘If we divide a composite substance into its parts, we may turn what was one substance into several substances’’ (41). 6. Stump characterizes Aquinas on the body-soul relation in just this way, and she uses that characterization to remind us that Christians are not necessarily committed to Cartesian substance dualism—Christian debate about theological anthropology need not be drawn into two camps, with all required to join either the materialist or the dualist side. So, ‘‘what Aquinas’s account of the soul shows us is that a certain kind of (restricted rather than global) materialism—one that takes mental states to be implemented in bodily states—is compatible with a certain sort of dualism—one that is non-Cartesian in character’’ (Eleanor Stump, ‘‘Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism without Reductionism,’’ Faith and Philosophy 12, no. 4, (1995), 522). A very accessible account is that of Brian Davies (The Thought of Thomas Aquinas [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992]). Another commendation of the Thomist alternative is that of Joseph Ratzinger, Dogmatic Theology: Death and Eternal Life, trans. M. Waldstein, ed. A. Nichols (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988). 7. Institutes, 1.5.5. 8. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Allen, Tex.: Christian Classics, Thomas More, 1981), I.Q76.A1. 9. Ibid., I.Q75.A1–2. 10. Stump, Aquinas, 36. Stump explains further that ‘‘Aquinas’s account is antireductionistic. It is not true on his account that a material whole is nothing but its material parts or is identical to its material components. The configuration of the whole will sometimes confer features, such as causal powers, on the whole which are not shared by the components of the whole’’ (197).

134

notes to pages 73–74

11. Stump, Aquinas, 39. An artifact is ‘‘one thing in some weaker sense than is at issue in the case of a substance’’ (42). 12. ST I.Q75.A4. 13. Ric Machuga (In Defense of the Soul: What It Means to Be Human [Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2002]) defends the concept that the soul is ‘‘in’’ the body in the way meaning is ‘‘in’’ words: ‘‘When words are functioning as intentional symbols, immaterial concepts have become ‘embodied’ ’’ (115). See also Stump, Aquinas. 14. ST I.Q76.A6. 15. Stump, Aquinas, 509. 16. ST I.Q91.A4. 17. In Summa Contra Gentiles (trans. Charles J. O’Neil, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1957; cited hereafter as SCG), Aquinas declares it ‘‘a necessary tenet of faith to believe that there will be a resurrection of the dead’’ (4.79, 4). Since Thomas did not finish his account of our final ends in the Summa Theologiae, the Summa Contra Gentiles contains the most complete account we have. 18. SCG 4.79, 10. Thomas maintains a sense in which souls are immortal— that is, they continue to exist and, with some limits, to function after separation from the body by death. The separated soul has a kind of knowledge, though the mode is different from what it is when embodied. Although John Wippel (‘‘Thomas Aquinas on the Separated Soul’s Natural Knowledge,’’ in Thomas Aquinas: Approaches to Truth—The Aquinas Lectures at Maynooth, 1996–2001, ed. James McEvoy and Michael Dunne [Dublin: Four Courts, 2002], 114–140) argues that Thomas does not downgrade the capabilities of the separated soul as he grows more committed to psychosomatic unity, Wippel does acknowledge that, ‘‘viewed in terms of the complete and composite nature of a human being, the condition of the separated soul is less perfect than it was in its embodied state, since it is only a part of the complete human being. . . . He restricts its knowledge to that which it could have either by using universal knowledge that it had previously attained in this life, or by appealing to infused species’’ (140). Souls are not meant to remain alone. Nature demands they be reunited with bodies. The disembodied soul is not the human being that God intends; it is ‘‘something like the mirror image of a human being who is in a persistent vegetative state. A human being in an irreversible vegetative state is an incomplete human being. So, in a very different sense, is a disembodied soul, on Aquinas’s view’’ (Stump, Aquinas, 211). In explaining the disembodied soul in Aquinas, Stump presses the point that constitution is not identity: ‘‘A particular can exist with less than the normal, natural complement of constituents. It can, for example, exist when it is constituted only by one of its main metaphysical parts, namely the soul. And so although a person is not identical to his soul, the existence of the soul is sufficient for the existence of a person’’ ( 53). Even the separated soul depends on its past connection to the material, to the body. 19. See Stump, Aquinas: ‘‘In the resurrection of the body, the soul can again make the unformed matter it informs this human being’’ (208).

notes to pages 75–79

135

20. Nancey Murphy, ‘‘Human Nature,’’ in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 24. 21. Ibid., 2. 22. Warren Brown, ‘‘Cognitive Contributions to Soul,’’ in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 99. 23. Ibid., 101. 24. Ray S. Anderson, ‘‘On Being Human: The Spiritual Sage of a Creaturely Soul,’’ in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 177. 25. Joel Green, ‘‘Bodies—That Is, Human Lives,’’ in Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998), 158. 26. I have already suggested that it seems probable that Thomism is a better option than holistic dualism insofar as it circumvents substance dualism. I suspect that it may also be preferable to nonreductive physicalism insofar as it can account for material identity at the resurrection. In any case, I want to remain agnostic, in this essay, about which option might describe reality. 27. Wippel, ‘‘Thomas Aquinas.’’ 28. Institutes, 1.15.2. 29. Brown ‘‘Cognitive Contributions to Soul,’’ 124. 30. J. P. Moreland and Scott B. Rae, Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics (Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2000). 31. Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues (Chicago: Open Court, 1999). MacIntyre implicates an anti-bodily bias in our failure to account for these features of human existence. ‘‘Consider,’’ he says, ‘‘how both physical and mental disability are afflictions of the body and how therefore habits of mind that express an attitude of denial towards the facts of disability and dependence presuppose either a failure or a refusal to acknowledge adequately the bodily dimensions of our existence’’ (4). He pushes us to an understanding of the good that fully acknowledges our embodied existence, to give ‘‘allegiance to a conception of the common good that requires both the virtues of the independent practical reasoner and the virtues of acknowledged dependence. . . . It is because and insofar as rational inquiry serves and partly constitutes that common good that it is itself the good that it is’’ (166). 32. Though Thomas, for example, explains it by differentiating the powers of animal souls (sensitive) from the powers of our souls (sensitive and intellective). 33. Panayiotis Nellas, Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person, trans. N. Russell (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987), 30. 34. For an interesting attempt to deal with this problem, see Ian A. McFarland, Difference and Identity: A Theological Anthropology (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001).

136

notes to pages 79–82

In McFarland’s account, human beings are ‘‘persons’’ in the way the persons of the Trinity are ‘‘persons,’’ marked by difference in relation. McFarland’s concerns to take anthropological difference seriously are on target. McFarland reminds us that Enlightenment ideals of equality have been conjoined with ‘‘theories of racial and sexual difference that justified the exclusion of non-European men and all women’’ (3). 35. Ibid., 28. 36. Karl Barth, The Church Dogmatics, 4 vols. in 13, trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–1975), vol. III/2, p. 325. Cited hereafter as ChD. 37. Ibid., III/2, 327. He continues: ‘‘The New Testament contains not the slightest hint of an emancipation of the bodily life of Jesus from the soul nor of an ascetic conflict of the soul of Jesus against the body. . . . The exaltation, the logicalising and rationalizing of the flesh, which is the mystery of His humanity, does not permit His body to become the enemy and conqueror of His soul; nor does it consist in the soul masquerading as the enemy or conqueror of His body’’ (338). Barth insists that we cannot divide up the actions of human beings between the body and the soul. Our actions are properly unified, belonging to one subject. Our bodies are properly us: ‘‘As soul of his body, he is neither in a foreign land, nor in a prison, nor even in a vessel, but wholly in his own house and wholly himself. Again, as body of his soul, he is not merely external; he does not cling to it accidentally; he is not merely its accompanist. Again, he has in it that which is his own, and is in it himself ’’ (426). 38. Daley (‘‘A Humble Mediator,’’) notes that it is especially the late Augustine, the focus of my close reading, who ‘‘uses the relationship of soul and body more and more as a Christological analogy’’ (104). 39. Institutes, 2.14.1. It may be that, insofar as Calvin has an inadequate understanding of the body-soul union, he is also open to charges of an inadequate Christology. In this quotation, though, he affirms the union of body-and-soul and a traditional Christology and does not shrink from describing the attributes of the two things united as interchanged. 40. Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ, trans. John Anthony McGuckin (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), 69. 41. Ibid., 73. 42. Ibid., 107. Herbert McCabe (God Matters, Springfield, Ill.: Templegate, 1987) explains that the ‘‘traditional doctrine of the incarnation is simply that both ranges of predicates [human and divine] apply to the same person referred to by the subject term ‘Jesus’ ’’, (47). 43. Cyril, On the Unity of Christ, 118. 44. J. Warren Smith, ‘‘Suffering Impassibly: Christ’s Passion in Cyril of Alexandria’s Soteriology,’’ Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 4 (2002), 463– 483. 45. Current theological suspicion of divine immutability might partially be dispelled by Augustine’s own caveat regarding any human hopes for becoming like God in this regard: ‘‘If, then, we are to understand this ‘impassibility’ to mean a life without those emotions which arise contrary to reason and which disturb the mind, it is clearly a good and desirable condition. It does not, however, belong to

notes to pages 82–87

137

this present life. . . . Moreover, if apatheia is to be defined as a condition such that the mind cannot be touched by any emotion whatsoever, who would not judge such insensitivity to be the worst of all vices?’’ (CD, 14.9.600). There is a clear relation between divine immutability and the immutable human body that both Augustine and Calvin look for at the resurrection. Augustine makes it clear that such a hope is not for a lack of feeling but for the erasure of those conditions that make the disordered body so problematic in this life. For a defense of divine immutability, see David Bentley Hart, ‘‘No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility,’’ Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 2 (2002), 184–206. Relevant to our argument here is McCabe’s acute observation that ‘‘the temptation to hold that it is the nature of God to suffer arises because of a weakening hold on the traditional doctrine of the incarnation’’ (God Matters, 46.) McCabe rightly warns that to lose Chalcedon in this way is to lose the bodily character of suffering: ‘‘Whereas a traditional Christian would say that God suffered a horrible pain in his hands when he was nailed to the cross, these theologians have to make do with a kind of mental anguish at the follies and sins of creatures’’ (46). 46. For more on this, see David Michael Levin, ed., Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), and Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). 47. Augustine rejected the trap of skepticism early. 48. Refer to CD 22.30.1178 where Augustine pictures the harmonies of the bodies of the saints as kindling for praise. 49. So Athanasius (On the Incarnation [Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003]) rejoiced in God’s becoming accessible to us as sensible beings: ‘‘He became Himself an object for the senses, so that those who were seeking God in sensible things might apprehend the Father through the works which He, the Word of God, did in the body’’ (43). 50. I am indebted here to Richard B. Hays, The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). Hays urges on his reader the notion that reading scripture as normative for the moral life requires ‘‘an integrative act of the imagination, a discernment about how our lives, despite their historical dissimilarity to the lives narrated in the New Testament, might fitly answer to that narration and participate in the truth that it tells’’ (298). As our reading leads to metaphor making, as we place our community within the text, the ‘‘metaphors reshape perception’’ (300). The psychosomatic church must embody the new way of seeing so derived.

chapter 5 1. 2 Corinthians 5:17 and Romans 12:1. In both instances, Paul’s language points to the unity of individuals in the one work of Christ. Many bodies offered are a single sacrifice. Where anyone is in Christ, the one new creation of God is to be found.

138

notes to pages 88–94

2. I am grateful to one of my anonymous readers at Oxford University Press for helping me clarify this point. 3. Brown, Body and Society, 167. 4. Ibid., 168. 5. Ibid., 294. See Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catherine P. Roth, (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002). 6. Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). 7. Ibid., 166. 8. Thomas Hopko, ‘‘God and Gender: Articulating the Orthodox View,’’ St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37, no. 2–3 (1993). 9. Ibid., 154. 10. Ibid., 158. 11. Ibid., 169; his italics. 12. Ibid., 167. To be fair, Hopko attempts to qualify his particular understanding of ordering in ways defined by the love and submission of Christ. So, his woman ‘‘is not man’s ‘assistant’ or ‘servant.’ Still less is she some sort of instrument or piece of property for his use (or abuse). She is rather (as we said about the church in relation to Christ) ‘another’ of the very same nature, the specific ‘other’ in whom man recognizes and completes himself as a person made in the image and likeness of God who is Love’’ (168). Hopko insists that this headship is one of love. 13. Ibid., 169. 14. Ibid., 182. 15. Verna F. Harrision, ‘‘Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology,’’ Journal of Theological Studies 41, no. 2 (1990), 444. 16. Ibid., 453. 17. Ibid., 447. 18. Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 235. 19. Popularized by Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage, 1989), and lucratively appropriated in Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (New York: Doubleday, 2003). 20. Harrison, ‘‘Male and Female,’’ 470. 21. Valerie A. Karras, ‘‘Patristic Views on the Ontology of Gender,’’ in Personhood: Orthodox Christianity and the Connection between Body, Mind, and Soul, ed. John T. Chirban (Westport, Conn.: Bergen and Garvey, 1996), 113. 22. Ibid., 114; her italics. 23. Ibid., 117. She also worries that, were gender essential, complete freedom would be denied. 24. For example, ‘‘it is a mistake to approach Paul’s writing with the modern idea that the resurrection of the body has to do with the moment of death, and that it is the guarantee of our survival as distinct individual selves. . . . The resurrection body signifies, rather, the solidarity of the recreated universe in Christ. It is none other than the Body of Christ in which we have a share’’ (John A.T. Robinson, The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology [London: SCM Press, 1952], 78–79).

notes to pages 95–99

139

25. Augustine’s answer is taken up by Thomas Aquinas, who also insists that male and female bodies are part of God’s intention and are natural. Thomas holds that ‘‘nothing that belongs to the perfection of nature will be denied to the bodies of the risen’’ (SCG 4.88, 1) and that ‘‘the frailty of the feminine sex is not in opposition to the perfection of the risen. For this frailty is not due to a shortcoming of nature, but to an intention of nature’’ (SCG 4.88, 3). That the feminine sex is, naturally, frail, is not questioned. 26. ST II.8.2. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it. 27. One instance is found in calls among evangelical Christians for a return to patriarchy. Those calling for this ‘‘return’’ claim to ground their hopes for clear gender roles in scripture, but the cultural assumptions at work are disturbing. For example, ‘‘Men who follow Jesus Christ, the dragon-slayer, must themselves become lesser dragon-slayers. And that is why it is absolutely essential for boys to play with wooden swords and plastic guns. Boys have a deep need to have something to defend, something to represent in battle’’ (Douglas Wilson, Future Men [Moscow, Id.: Canon, 2001]), 16). Again, ‘‘boys do not know how to make the distinction between that which should be mocked in themselves and that which should be honored in girls. For those boys who gravitate toward playing house, and dolls, and dress-ups, wise parental control, oversight, and redirection is necessary’’ (20). This may seem far outside of the mainstream, but I have a stack of materials advocating ‘‘biblical patriarchy’’ on my desk, and I hear it discussed as a live option in some Christian circles. 28. Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake (New York: Doubleday, 2003), 205–206. 29. Hopko, ‘‘God and Gender,’’ 153. 30. So, according to Barth, ‘‘man is really alone and not occupied with God at all but only with himself, absolutising his own nature and being. . . . But we must not conceal from ourselves, and we all know well enough, that this is, so to speak, the natural, general, and normal aspect of everything which we call our knowledge of God’’ (ChD II/1.71). 31. ‘‘We are totally and not just partially incapable of occupying any independent vantage point from the height of which we might penetrate and judge ourselves’’ (ibid., III/2.30). 32. Barth carries this logic through completely. We know human nature only in Jesus of Nazareth: ‘‘We are invited to infer from His human nature the character of our own, to know ourselves in Him, but in Him really to know ourselves’’ (III/2.54). Again, ‘‘He is a human person. He is the human soul of a human body. . . . It is not the case, however, that He must partake of humanity. On the contrary, humanity must partake of him’’ (III/2.59). 33. For a fuller account, which draws an illuminating comparison between Barth on gender and Barth on the Jews, see Eugene Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). Rogers puts the matter quite charitably when he says that Barth’s ‘‘account of the command of God on this matter [the creation of male and female] is less scripturalist than it appears’’ (140). 34. Rogers critiques; ‘‘I-Thou phenomenology tends to reduce co-humanity to coindividuality and wash out the ecclesial nature of the biblical healing stories’’ (ibid., 184).

140

notes to pages 99–105

35. Such a mistake will have negative ethical implications. Robert Jenson adopts Barth on the body when he speaks of marriage: ‘‘Sexuality is therefore the way in which our directedness to each other, the intrinsic commonality of human being, is built into the very objects as which we are there for one another’’ (Systematic Theology [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], vol. 2, 89). Based on this, Jenson suggests that we, and we know this ‘‘we’’ is almost always female, might be obligated to offer our bodies to a violent spouse: ‘‘It must be recognized that staying with the spouse may indeed kill and that society cannot require martyrdom—not even the church can require it’’ (93). Something has gone dreadfully wrong in this argument—male and female bodies are not for each other in devouring relationship; they are for God. 36. Rogers makes a similar point (Sexuality and the Christian Body, 240). 37. Jones, Feminist Theory, 67. 38. Bynum, Resurrection of the Body, 37 n.67. 39. Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body, 198. 40. Or so it is in the eschatological imagination of Flannery O’Connor (‘‘Revelation,’’ in The Complete Stories [New York: Farrar, Strauss Giroux, 1971] in which the condemnatory Mrs. Turpin sees a vision of the dirty, poor, and oppressed people she despises marching first into heaven, and ‘‘bringing up the end of the procession’’ are ‘‘a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right. . . . She could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away’’ (508). 41. If we take scripture seriously, it even seems likely. This is the basis of assertion of a ‘‘preferential option for the poor.’’ 42. Peter Brown narrates how the ancient city used women’s bodies for reproduction as a means of assuring continuity: ‘‘As the opponents of Paul and Thecla pointed out, procreation, and not the chilling doctrine introduced by Saint Paul, was the only way to ensure a ‘resurrection of the dead’ ’’ (Body and Society, 7). 43. Jenson, Systematic Theology, vol 2, 358. 44. Ibid., 110. See also Robinson, Body. 45. Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body, 227. 46. Schmemann, Oh Death, 42– 43. 47. This is Stanley Hauerwas’s concern in Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified (Nashville: Abingdon, 1998), 77–91. In the postmodern body, Hauerwas finds hope for a ‘‘display of holiness without a loss of the catholic character of the church. The loss of the ‘self ’ and the increasing appreciation of the significance of the body, and in particular the body’s permeability, can help us rediscover holiness not as an individual achievement but as the work of the Holy Spirit building up the body of Christ’’ (78). 48. What else could be the purpose of the Wesleyan class meeting? Likewise, traditions on both the left and the right recognize the importance of our embodiment. Though often twisted, Christian concern with sexual behavior is also best understood as being about recognition of the importance of the body to holiness and inseparability of the holiness of the individual body and the ecclesial body.

notes to pages 105–112

141

49. John Wesley includes both justification and sanctification under the heading of salvation: ‘‘It is by this faith we are saved, justified and sanctified’’ (John Wesley, ed. Albert C. Outler [New York: Oxford University Press, 1964], 276). Wesley will not let go of the promise that God (in the absolute sovereignty of grace) will in fact make us new. 50. Ibid., 381. 51. For more on this topic, see George Lawless, ‘‘Augustine’s Decentring of Asceticism,’’ in Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless (London: Routledge, 2000), 142–163. Lawless compares Augustine’s asceticism with Foucault’s techniques du soi, ‘‘training exercises for care and maturation of the self ’’ (143). 52. Shaw, Burden of the Flesh, 216–217. 53. Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body, 82. 54. Hauerwas, Sanctify Them, 84. 55. Ibid. We are redeemed through our ‘‘material embodiment in the habits and practices of a people that makes possible a away of life that is otherwise impossible’’ (74). 56. Nellas, Deification in Christ, 114. 57. For more on this topic, see Reinhard Hu¨tter, Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice, trans. Doug Stott (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000). 58. Nellas, Deification in Christ, 100–101. 59. For example: ‘‘It is not just that our bodies are animal bodies with the identity and the continuities of animal bodies, as I have already asserted. Human identity is primarily, even if not only, bodily and therefore animal identity and it is by reference to that identity that the continuities of our relationships to others are partly defined’’ (MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals, 8). 60. Rogers, Sexuality and the Christian Body, 227. 61. ST 2-2. 27. 4. Thomas’s explanation of how we know God through things is quite instructive here. 62. Bordo, ‘‘The body and the reproduction of femininity,’’ 97. 63. Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 57. 64. Thieleman J. Van Braght, The Bloody Theater or Martyr’s Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Savior: The Story of Seventeen Centuries of Christian Martyrdom, From the Time of Christ to a.d. 1660, trans. Joseph F. Sohm (Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 2002), 178. 65. Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, 5.1.41, quoted in Brown, Body and Society, 73. 66. Bonaventure, ‘‘The Life of St. Francis,’’ in Bonaventure, trans. Ewert Cousins (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1978), 306. 67. Grosz, Volatile Bodies, 22. 68. The now common feminist objection is Rosemary Radford Ruether’s; see the chapter ‘‘Can a Male Savior Save Women?’’in her Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology (Boston: Beacon, 1983), 116–138. 69. On this topic, see Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s

142

notes to page 112

Seminary Press, 1999). The East’s icon theology reveals a thoroughly Christological understanding of the material as integral to salvation. 70. For example, Graham Ward, ‘‘Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ,’’ in Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward (London: Routledge, 1999), 163–181. Ward’s is an attempt to avoid the dangers of essentialism. For Ward, ‘‘What happens at the ascension, theologically, constitutes a critical moment in a series of displacements or assumptions of the male body of Jesus Christ such that the body of Christ, and the salvation it both seeks and works out (Paul’s katergomai), become multi-gendered’’ (163). Ward would not need to make Jesus’ fully human body ‘‘multi-gendered’’ if he began with the recognition that Christ’s body is fully a body in multivalent ways—in Nazareth, on the altar, and in the church. Difference is included in the latter two valences but can only be properly so included because it is real in the first.

References

Alfeche, M. ‘‘The Basis of Hope in the Resurrection of the Body According to Augustine.’’ Augustiniana 36 (1986), 240–296. ———. ‘‘The Rising of the Dead in the Work of Augustine.’’ Augustiniana 39 (1989), 54–98. ———. ‘‘The Transformation from ‘Corpus Animale’ to ‘Corpus Spirituale’ According to Augustine.’’ Augustiniana 42 (1992), 239–310. ———. ‘‘The Use of Some Verses in 1 Cor 15 in Augustine’s Theology of Resurrection.’’ Augustiniana 37 (1987), 122–186. Allberry, C. R. C. A Manichaean Psalm-Book: Part II. Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1938. Allen, Carolyn, and Judith A. Howard, eds. Provoking Feminisms. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. Althaus, Paul. The Theology of Martin Luther. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1966. Anderson, Ray S. ‘‘On Being Human: The Spiritual Sage of a Creaturely Soul.’’ In Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, 175–194. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998. Athanasius. On the Incarnation. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. Atwood, Margaret. Oryx and Crake. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God against the Pagans. Ed. R.W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. Civitate Dei. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 40, Vienna, 1866. ———. Confessions. Trans. Maria Boulding. New York: Vintage, 1997. Barger, Lilian Calles. Eve’s Revenge: Women and a Spirituality of the Body. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2003.

144

references

Barth, Karl. The Church Dogmatics. 4 vols. in 13. Trans. G. W. Bromiley et al. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1936–1975. Battles, Ford Lewis. ‘‘God Was Accommodating Himself to Human Capacity.’’ Interpretation 31, no. 1 (1977), 19–38. Bauerschmidt, Frederick Christian. Julian of Norwich and the Mystical Body Politic of Christ. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. Trans. H. M. Parshley. New York: Vintage, 1949. Beckwith, Sarah. Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings. London: Routledge, 1993. BeDuhn, Jason David. The Manichaean Body: In Discipline and Ritual. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Bloom, Harold. The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation. New York: Touchstone, 1992. Bonaventure, ‘‘The Life of St. Francis.’’ In Bonaventure. Trans. Ewert Cousins. Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1978. Bordo, Susan. ‘‘The Body and the Reproduction of Femininity.’’ In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury, 90–110. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Børresen, Kari Elisabeth. ‘‘Patristic ‘Feminism’: The Case of Augustine.’’ Augustinian Studies 25 (1994), 139–152. ———. Subordination and Equivalence: The Nature and Role of Woman in Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Washington D.C.: University Press of America, 1968. Bottomley, Frank. Attitudes to the Body in Western Christendom. London: Lebus, 1979. Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Brown, Dan. The Da Vinci Code. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Brown, Peter. Augustine and Sexuality. Berkeley: Center for Hermeneutical Studies in Hellenistic and Modern Culture. Graduate Theological Union, and University of California, 1983. ———. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. Brown, Warren. ‘‘Cognitive Contributions to Soul.’’ In Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998. Brunner, Emil, and Karl Barth. Natural Theology: Comprising ‘‘Nature and Grace’’ by Professor Dr. Emil Brunner and the Reply ‘‘No!’’ by Dr. Karl Barth. Trans. Peter Fraenkel. Eugene, Ore.: Wipf and Stock, 2002. Burns, J. P. ‘‘Variations on a Dualist Theme: Augustine on the Body and the Soul.’’ In Interpreting Tradition, ed. J. Kopas. Chicago: Scholars Press, 1984. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘‘Sex.’’ New York: Routledge, 1993. ———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990.

references

145

———. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bynum, Caroline Walker. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Cahill, Lisa Sowle. Sex, Gender and Christian Ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Calvin, John. Institutes of the Christian Religion. Ed. and trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1987 [1536]. ———. Psychopannychia. Vol. 3 of Selected Works of John Calvin. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1983. Cary, Phillip. Augustine’s Invention of the Inner Self: The Legacy of a Christian Platonist. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Clark, Elizabeth A. Ascetic Piety and Women’s Faith: Essays on Late Ancient Christianity. Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1986. Clark, Francis. Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1967. Coakley, Sarah. Powers and Submissions: Spirituality, Philosophy, and Gender. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. ———, ed. Religion and the Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Cooey, Paula M. Religious Imagination and the Body: A Feminist Analysis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Cooper, John W. Body, Soul, and Life Everlasting: Biblical Anthropology and the MonismDualism Debate. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1989. Crouse, Robert, ‘‘Paucis Mutatis Verbis: St. Augustine’s Platonism.’’ In Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 37–50. London: Routledge, 2000. Cullmann, Oscar. ‘‘Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament (The Ingersoll Lecture for 1955).’’ In Immortality and Resurrection: Death in the Western World—Two Conflicting Currents of Thought, ed. Krister Stendahl, 9–53. New York: Macmillan, 1965. Cyril of Alexandria. On the Unity of Christ. Trans. John Anthony McGuckin. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. Daley, Brian E. ‘‘A Humble Mediator: The Distinctive Elements in Saint Augustine’s Christology.’’ Word and Spirit 9 (1987), 100–117. Davies, Brian. The Thought of Thomas Aquinas. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992. Davis, Thomas J. ‘‘Not ‘Hidden and Far Off ’: The Bodily Aspect of Salvation and Its Implications for Understanding the Body in Calvin’s Theology.’’ Calvin Theological Journal 29 (1994), 406– 418. Donne, John. ‘‘Holy Sonnets, X.’’ In Poems of John Donne. Ed. E. K. Chambers, vol. 1, 162–163. London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896. Douglas, Kelly Brown. Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective. Maryknoll, Md.: Orbis, 1999. Dutton, Kenneth R. The Perfectible Body: The Western Ideal of Physical Development. London: Cassell, 1995. Ellis, Kathryn, and Hartley Dean, eds. Social Policy and the Body: Transitions in Corporeal Discourse. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000.

146

references

Engel, Mary Potter. John Calvin’s Perspectival Anthropology. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988. Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth. Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Fredriksen, Paula. ‘‘Beyond the Body/Soul Dichotomy: Augustine on Paul against the Manichees and the Pelagians.’’ Recherches Augustiniennes 23 (1988), 87–114. Gallagher, Catherine, and Thomas Laqueur, eds. The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Gerrish, Brian. Grace and Gratitude: The Eucharistic Theology of John Calvin. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. Gilson, Etienne. The Christian Philosophy of Saint Augustine. Trans. L. E. M. Lynch. New York: Random House, 1960. Goodloe, James C., IV. ‘‘The Body in Calvin’s Theology.’’ Paper presented at the Colloquium on Calvin Studies at Davidson College and Davidson College Presbyterian Church, Jan. 19–20, 1990. Green, Joel, ‘‘ ’Bodies—That Is, Human Lives’: A Re-Examiniation of Human Nature in the Bible.’’ In Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998. Gregory of Nyssa. On the Soul and the Resurrection. Trans. Catherine P. Roth. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. Gunton, Colin, ed. Cambridge Companion to Christian Doctrine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Hanby, Michael. Augustine and Modernity. London: Routledge, 2003. Harrison, Verna F. ‘‘Male and Female in Cappadocian Theology.’’ Journal of Theological Studies 41, no. 2 (1990), 441– 471. Hart, David Bentley. ‘‘No Shadow of Turning: On Divine Impassibility.’’ Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 2 (2002), 184–206. Hauerwas, Stanley. Sanctify Them in the Truth: Holiness Exemplified. Nashville, Tenn.: Abingdon Press, 1998. Hays, Richard. The Moral Vision of the New Testament: A Contemporary Introduction to New Testament Ethics. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996. Hopko, Thomas. ‘‘God and Gender: Articulating the Orthodox View.’’ St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 37, no. 2–3 (1993), 141–183. Hunter, David. ‘‘Augustinian Pessimism? A New Look at Augustine’s Teaching on Sex, Marriage, and Celibacy.’’ Augustinian Studies 25 (1994), 153–177. Hu¨tter, Reinhard. Suffering Divine Things: Theology as Church Practice. Trans. Doug Stott. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000. Isherwood, Lisa, and Elizabeth Stuart. Introducing Body Theology. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998. Jaggar, Alison M. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983.

references

147

Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Jenson, Robert W. Systematic Theology, vol. 2. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. John Paul II. The Theology of the Body: Human Love in the Divine Plan. Boston: Pauline Press, 1997. Jones, Serene. Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000. Karras, Valerie A. ‘‘Eschatology.’’ In The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Theology, ed. Susan Frank Parsons, 243–260. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. ‘‘Patristic Views on the Ontology of Gender.’’ In Personhood: Orthodox Christianity and the Connection between Body, Mind, and Soul, ed. John T. Chirban, 113–119. Westport, Conn.: Bergen and Garvey, 1996. Lamott, Anne. Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books/Doubleday, 2000. Laqueur, Thomas Walter. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990. Lawless, George. ‘‘Augustine and Human Embodiment.’’ Augustiniana 40 (1990), 167–186. ———. ‘‘Augustine’s Decentring of Asceticism.’’ In Augustine and His Critics, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 142–163. London: Routledge, 2000. Levin, David Michael, ed. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lieu, Samuel N. C. Manichaeism: In the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China—A Historical Survey. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985. Machuga, Ric. In Defense of the Soul: What It Means to Be Human. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Brazos, 2002. MacIntyre, Alasdair C. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Chicago: Open Court, 1999. Macy, Gary. Banquet’s Wisdom: A Short History of the Theologies of the Lord’s Supper. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. Matter, E. Ann. ‘‘Christ, God and Woman in the Thought of St. Augustine.’’ In Augustine and His Critics: Essays in Honour of Gerald Bonner, ed. Robert Dodaro and George Lawless, 164–175. London: Routledge, 2000. Matthews, Gareth B. ‘‘Augustine and Descartes on minds and bodies.’’ In The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. McCabe, Herbert. God Matters. Springfield, Ill.: Templegate, 1987. McFague, Sallie. The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993. McFarland, Ian A. Difference and Identity: A Theological Anthropology. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001. Menn, Stephen. Descartes and Augustine. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

148

references

Midgley, Mary. ‘‘The Soul’s Successors: Philosophy and the ‘Body.’ ’’ In Religion and the Body, ed. Sarah Coakley, 53–68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Miles, Margaret R. Augustine on the Body. American Academy of Religion Dissertation Series No. 31. Missoula, Mont.: Scholar’s Press, 1979. ———. Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine’s Confessions. New York: Crossroad, 1992. ———. ‘‘The Revelatory Body: Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Flesh at Orvieto.’’ Arts 6, no. 1 (1994), 14–23. ———. ‘‘Theology, Anthropology, and the Human Body in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.’’ Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 3 (1981), 303–323. ———. ‘‘Vision: The Eye of the Body and the Eye of the Mind in Saint Augustine’s De trinitate and Confessions.’’ Journal of Religion 63 (April 1983), 125–142. Moltmann-Wendel, Elizabeth. I Am My Body: A Theology of Embodiment. Trans. John Bowden. New York: Continuum, 1995. Moreland, J. P, and Scott B. Rae. Body and Soul: Human Nature and the Crisis in Ethics. Downers Grove, Ill.: Intervarsity Press, 2000. Mourant, John A. Augustine on Immortality. Villanova, Penn.: Augustinian Institute, Villanova University, 1969. Murphy, Nancey, ‘‘Human Nature.’’ In Whatever Happened to the Soul? Scientific and Theological Portraits of Human Nature, ed. Warren S. Brown, Nancey Murphy, and H. Newton Malony, 1–29. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998, Nellas, Panayiotis. Deification in Christ: Orthodox Perspectives on the Nature of the Human Person. Trans. N. Russell. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987. Noonan, John T., Jr. Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists. Enl. ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Nussbaum, Martha. ‘‘The Professor of Parody.’’ New Republic, February 22, 1999, 37– 45. O’Connor, Flannery. ‘‘Revelation.’’ The Complete Stories, 488–509. New York: Farrar, Strauss Giroux, 1971. Ouspensky, Leonid, and Vladimir Lossky. The Meaning of Icons. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kadloubovsky. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1999. Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. New York: Vintage, 1989. Pitkin, Barbara. ‘‘Nothing but Concupiscence: Calvin’s Understanding of Sin and the Via Augustini.’’ Calvin Theological Journal 34 (1999), 347–369. ———. What Pure Eyes Can See. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Porter, Ray. ‘‘History of the Body.’’ In New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Quistorp, Heinrich. Calvin’s Doctrine of the Last Things. Trans. Harold Knight. London: Lutterworth, 1955. Ratzinger, Joseph. Eschatology: Death, and Eternal Life. Trans. M. Waldstein. Ed. A Nichols. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1988.

references

149

Riley, Denise, ‘‘Bodies, Identities, Feminisms.’’ In Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, 220–226. New York: Routledge, 1999. Robinson, John A.T. The Body: A Study in Pauline Theology. London: SCM Press, 1952. Rogers, Eugene. Sexuality and the Christian Body: Their Way into the Triune God. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. Rousselle, Aline. Porneia: On Desire and the Body in Antiquity. Trans. Felicia Pheasant. Oxford: Blackwell, 1988. Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Sexism and God Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon, 1983. Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Schmemann, Alexander. Oh Death Where Is Thy Sting? Trans. Alexis Vinogradov. Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003. Schreiner, Susan E. Theater of His Glory: Nature and the Natural Order in the Thought of John Calvin. Durham, N.C.: Labyrinth, 1991. Shaw, Teresa M. The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998. Shildrick, Margaret, and Janet Price. ‘‘Openings on the Body: A Critical Introduction.’’ In Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, 1–14. New York: Routledge, 1999. Shuman, Joel James. The Body of Compassion: Ethics, Medicine, and the Church. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1999. Sideris, Lisa H. Environmental Ethics, Ecological Theology, and Natural Selection. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Simmonds, Felly Nkweto, ‘‘My Body, Myself: How Does a Black Woman Do Sociology.’’ In Janet Price and Margaret Shildrick, eds., Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader, 50–63. New York: Routledge, 1999. Slattery, Dennis P. The Wounded Body: Remembering the Markings of the Flesh. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Smith, J. Warren. ‘‘Suffering Impassibly: Christ’s Passion in Cyril of Alexandria’s Soteriology.’’ Pro Ecclesia 11, no. 4 (2002), 463– 483. Spelman, Elizabeth. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon, 1988. Steinmetz, David C. Calvin in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Stephenson, John R. ‘‘Martin Luther and the Eucharist.’’ Scottish Journal of Theology 36, no. 4 (1983), 447– 461. Stump, Eleanor. Aquinas. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. ———. ‘‘Non-Cartesian Substance Dualism and Materialism without Reduction.’’ Faith and Philosophy 12, no. 4 (October 1995), 505–531. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles. Trans. Charles J. O’Neil. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1957.

150

references

———. Summa Theologica. 5 vols. Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. Allen, Tex.: Christian Classics, Thomas More, 1981. Torrance, T. F. Calvin’s Doctrine of Man. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1957. Van Braght, Thieleman J. The Bloody Theater or Martyr’s Mirror of the Defenseless Christians Who Baptized Only upon Confession of Faith, and Who Suffered and Died for the Testimony of Jesus, Their Savior: The Story of Seventeen Centuries of Christian Martyrdom, from the Time of Christ to a.d. 1660. Trans. Joseph F. Sohm. Scottdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 2002. Van Fleteren, F. ‘‘Augustine and the Resurrection.’’ Studies in Medieval Culture 12 (1978), 9–15. Wainwright, Geoffrey. Doxology: The Praise of God in Worship, Doctrine, and Life—A Systematic Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. Ward, Graham. ‘‘Bodies: The Displaced Body of Jesus Christ.’’ In Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology, ed. John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, 163–181. London: Routledge, 1999. Watson, Gerald. ‘‘St. Augustine, the Platonists, and the Resurrection Body: Augustine’s Use of a Fragment from Porphyry.’’ Irish Theological Quarterly 50 (1983/84), 222–232. Welton, Donn. The Body: Classic and Contemporary Readings. Malden, U.K.: Blackwell, 1999. Wendel, Franc¸ois. Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought. Trans. Philip Mairet. New York: Harper and Row, 1950. Wesley, John. John Wesley, ed. Albert C. Outler. New York: Oxford University Press, 1964. Williams, Dolores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1993. Wilson, Douglas. Future Men. Moscow, Id.: Canon, 2001. Wippel, John. ‘‘Thomas Aquinas on the Separated Soul’s Natural Knowledge.’’ In Thomas Aquinas: Approaches to Truth—The Aquinas Lectures at Maynooth, 1996– 2001, ed. James McEvoy and Michael Dunne, 114–140. Dublin: Four Courts, 2002. Wright, Michelle M. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004.

Index

abuse, 11, 18, 26, 47 asceticism, 12–13, 91–93, 105–107, 141n.51 Allen, Carolyn, 18 Anderson, Ray S., 75 anthropology. See theological anthropology Aquinas, Thomas anthropology of, 73–74, 77–78, 133nn.5–6, 133n.10 on knowing God, 141n.61 on the powers of the soul, 134n.18, 135n.32 on the resurrection, 17, 123n.17, 134nn.17–18, 139n.25 Athanasius, 109, 137n.49 Barth, Karl, 79, 96–100, 103, 136n.37, 139n.30, 139nn.32–33, 140n.35 de Beauvoir, Simone, 11–12, 18 beauty industry, 5 in Augustine, 28–29, 37, 46–47, 84, 95 redeemed, 110, 114 Beckwith, Sarah, 13, 117n.13

Børresen, Kari Elizabeth, 40 Brown, Peter, 13, 45, 48, 90, 117n.7, 121n.3 Brown, Warren, 75, 78 Butler, Judith, 21, 47, 91, 96–97, 100, 112, 120n.38 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 15–17, 117n.7, 118n.18–19 Cahill, Lisa Sowle, 116n.4 Cary, Phillip, 124–125n.29 Chalcedon, 5, 42, 62, 80–82, 101, 137n.45 Christology, 12, 14–15 in Augustine, 26–29, 37–42 of the body, 13, 79, 88, 98–100, 104–105 in Calvin, 53–55, 62–65, 68 of particularity, 110–113 of the two natures, 79–82 Clark, Francis, 64 Coakley, Sarah, 91, 94 communication of attributes. See communicatio idiomatum communicatio idiomatum, 63, 80–83, 101

152

index

communion. See eucharist constructivism, 5, 21–26, 120n.43 Cooper, John W., 72–73 creation doctrine of, 3–6, 12–15, 89 in Augustine, 28, 33, 36–37, 43, 84 in Calvin, 55, 58, 83 Cyril of Alexandria, 81–82 Cullmann, Oscar, 118n.26

Hays, Richard, 137n.50 holiness, 4, 12, 43, 85, 87–89, 93, 105–114, 140nn.47–48 Hopko, Thomas, 91–94, 97, 138n.12 Howard, Judith, 18

Descartes, Rene, 39, 41, 65–66, 77, 116n.3, 135n.29, 126n.33, 133n.6 difference, 18–24, 71–73, 89–94, 101–103, 136n.34 dualism problem of, 12–15, 18–23, 70–76, 78, 88, 119n.29 in Augustine, 33, 40, 43, in Calvin, 56–57, 64–66, 68, 81

Jaggar, Alison, 20, 119n.32 Jenson, Robert W., 103–104, 140n.35 Jones, Serene, 22, 100

Eastern Orthodoxy, 91–93, 107 ecclesiology, 27, 79, 84, 94, 107–108, 112–114 essentialism, 5, 21–24, 120n.43, 142n.70 Eucharist, 63–64, 100, 104, 107–108, 112 feminism contemporary theory of, 10–11, 18–19, 21–23, 115n.3 types of, 20 theological, 24–25, 40–43, 111, 113, 118n.27 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 119n.34 Fredriksen, Paula, 40, 123n.9, 124n.26 garments of skin, 91 Gnosticism, 16, 91–93, 106, 115n.1, 117n.10 Green, Joel, 75 Gregory of Nyssa, 91–93, 96, 106 Grosz, Elizabeth, 21–24, 110–111, 120n.39 Gunton, Colin, 39 Harrison, Verna F., 93–94 Hauerwas, Stanley, 107, 140n.47

icon, 112, 142n.69 incarnation, 36–37, 42, 62, 76, 81, 112–113

Karras, Valarie, 94 Lamott, Anne, 23 MacIntyre, Alasdair C., 135n.31, 141n.59 McFague, Sallie, 120–121n.46 McFarland, Ian A., 79, 135–136n.34 Manicheism, 39–44 marriage, 34, 44–45, 90, 106, 140n.35 martyrs, 13, 16, 27–29, 109–111 Miles, Margaret, 44, 117n.7, 125n.29, 125n.33, 125n.34 Monophysitism, 101 Murphy, Nancey, 74–75 Nellas, Panayiotis, 107–108 nonreductive physicalism, 74–76 Noonan, John T., 40 Origen, 90–91 Orthodoxy. See Eastern Orthodoxy Paul, 7, 15–16, 33, 102–103, 107 Pitkin, Barbara, 60 Platonism, 38–41, 55, 57, 73, 116n.3 psychosomatic unity, 23, 56, 70–76, 78–82, 88, 101–105. See also theological anthropology race, 18, 20, 109, 115n.3 Rogers, Eugene, 102, 104, 106, 108

index sacraments, 10, 44, 64–66, 85, 103–107 sanctification, 33, 70–72, 79–81, 89, 96, 103–110 Schmemann, Alexander, 7, 9, 24, 104, 116n.3 Schreiner, Susan E., 65, 129n.18 Shaw, Teresa, 12–13, 93, 106 sexuality, 20–22, 33, 39–40, 43–45, 48, 81–82, 93–95, 104–108 soul in Augustine, 31–40 in Calvin, 50–54, 56–57, 59–60, 63, 69 described theologically, 70, 75–85 in relation to the body, 3, 12–15, 18–19, 23, 71–75 Steinmetz, David C., 130n.26, 131n.37

153

Stump, Eleanor, 73, 133nn.5–6, 133n.10, 134n.18 Taylor, Charles, 41, 124n.28 theological anthropology in Augustine, 40, 47–48 in Calvin, 56–58, 81 feminist resources for, 19–23 theological resources for, 24, 68, 70–73, 89, 98–99, 110, 114 See also psychosomatic unity vision of God, 45–56, 82–84, 103, 114, 118n.18, 125n.29 in Calvin, 55–56, 60–61, 112 Wesley, Charles, 62 Wesley, John, 105, 140n.48, 141n.49 wounds, 28–29, 88, 110–111, 114